War in 100 Events E-Book

Martin van Creveld

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 209

Beschreibung

'War is a duel written large.' How did we get from clubs and spears to machine guns and drone missiles? What led to the human race firing projectiles across a no-man's-land, from straightforward warfare to spies and insurgency? Here renowned military historian Martin van Creveld has compiled a concise guide to the history of war in 100 key events, from 10,000 BCE to the present day: Stone Age 'wars'; Vikings raids; medieval conflicts; revolutionary wars; Napoleonic wars; world wars; the Iraq war; women in war and much more. With intriguing facts and a worldwide range, War in 100 Events is an immensely entertaining volume for military buffs and laymen alike.

Leseprobe

First published in 2017

The History Press

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This ebook edition first published in 2017

All illustrations by Martin Latham

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Text © Martin van Creveld, 2017

Illustrations © The History Press, 2017

The right of Martin van Creveld to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Contents

Why this Book

Part I. The Ascent of War, 10,000 BCE–476 CE

1   c. 10,000 BCE: The Beginning of War?

2   c. 3500 BCE: Beginning of the Bronze Age

3   c. 2650 BCE: The Battle of Banquan

4   1274 BCE: The Battle of Kadesh

5   1194 BCE: Beginning of the Trojan War

6   1186 BCE: First Naval Battle on Record

7   c. 1000 BCE: Incipient Shift from Bronze to Iron Weapons

8   541 BCE: Birth Year of Sun Tzu

9   490 BCE: First Persian Invasion of Greece

10   431 BCE: Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War

11   399 BCE: The Invention of Mechanical Artillery

12   338 BCE: First Campaign of Alexander the Great

13   264 BCE: Outbreak of the Punic Wars

14   220 BCE: Construction of China’s Great Wall Begins

15   200 BCE: Opening of Rome’s Conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean

16   91 BCE: Outbreak of the Roman Civil Wars

17   9 CE: The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest

18   378 CE: The Battle of Adrianople

19   c. 400 CE: Publication of Vegetius’ Epitoma Rei Militaris

20   451 CE: Battle of the Catalaunian Plains

Part II. Medieval War, 476–1494 CE

21   533: Opening of Justinian’s Campaigns

22   629: T’ang Campaigns Against the Eastern Turkic Kahganate

23   634: Mohammed’s Followers Burst Out of the Arabian Peninsula

24   732: Battle of Tours Turns Back the Muslims in Europe

25   c. 750: In Europe the Shift Towards Cavalry Begins

26   771: Beginning of Charlemagne’s Wars

27   789: Beginning of the Viking Raids

28   894: Beginning of the Hungarian Campaigns in Europe

29   1095: Urban II Proclaims the First Crusade

30   1197: Opening of Genghis Khan’s Campaigns

31   1274: First Mongol Attempt to Invade Japan

32   1337: Outbreak of the Hundred Years War

33   1346: First Recorded Use of Gunpowder in the West

34   1370: Opening of Timur’s Campaigns

35   1380: Dmitry Donskoy Defeats the Golden Horde at Kulikovo

36   1427: Opening of the Aztec Imperial Wars

37   1438: Opening of the Inca Imperial Wars

38   1453: The Ottomans Capture Constantinople

39   c. 1460: Dawning of the Columbian Age

40   1492: Completion of the Reconquista

Part III. Fighting with Guns, 1495–1815 CE

41   1494: Opening of the Italian Wars

42   c. 1522: Introduction of the Artillery Fortress

43   1571: The Battle of Lepanto

44   1575: The Battle of Nagashino

45   1588: Defeat of the Spanish Armada

46   1618: Outbreak of the Thirty Years War

47   1644: Beijing Falls to the Qin of Manchuria

48   c. 1660: Culmination of the Military Revolution

49   1667: Beginning of Louis XIV’s Wars

50   1700: Outbreak of the Great Northern War

51   1740: Outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession

52   1756: Outbreak of the Seven Years War

53   1757: Battle of Plassey

54   1769: Beginning of the Wars of Catherine the Great

55   1775: First Shots in the War of the American Revolution

56   1792: Outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars

57   1803: Outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars

58   1808: Outbreak of the Wars of Latin American Independence

59   1812: War of 1812

60   1815: Waterloo and the End of the Napoleonic Wars

Part IV. Industrial War, 1815–1945 CE

61   1830: Beginning of the French Conquest of Algeria

62   1832: Publication of Clausewitz’s On War

63   c. 1835: Beginning of the Military–Technological Revolution

64   1839: Outbreak of the Opium Wars

65   1846: Outbreak of the Mexican–American War

66   1853: Outbreak of the Crimean War

67   1859: Franco-Austrian War

68   1861: Outbreak of the American Civil War

69   1864: Beginning of the Wars of German Unification

70   1866: The Battle of Lissa

71   1894: Outbreak of the Chinese–Japanese War

72   1898: Spanish–American War

73   1904: Outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War

74   1914: Outbreak of World War I

75   1917: Outbreak of the Russian Civil War

76   1936: Outbreak of the Spanish Civil War

77   1937: Outbreak of the Chinese–Japanese War

78   1939: Outbreak of World War II in Europe

79   1941: Outbreak of World War II in the Pacific

80   1945: First (and Last) Use of Nuclear Weapons

Part V. The Regression of War, 1945 CE–Present

81   1946: Resumption of the Chinese Civil War

82   1946: Outbreak of the Indochina War

83   1947: First Round of the Indo-Pak Wars

84   1948: Opening Round in the Arab–Israeli Wars

85   1950: Outbreak of the Korean War

86   1954: Outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence

87   1962: Cuban Missile Crisis

88   1965: The US Enters the Vietnam War

89   c. 1970: Women’s Role in the Military Starts Expanding

90   1973: The US Ends Conscription

91   1979: Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan

92   1980: Outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War

93   1980: PTSD Enters the DSM

94   1990: First Gulf War

95   c. 1991: The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)

96   1991: Outbreak of the War(s) in Yugoslavia

97   2001: Nine-Eleven

98   2001: American Invasion of Afghanistan

99   2003: American Invasion of Iraq

100   2010: Outbreak of the ‘Arab Spring’ Wars

 Further Reading

Why this Book

As many readers will know, I have spent much of my life studying war. As far as I can reconstruct my career, my interest in it developed in four stages. The first spark was provided by a Dutch schoolbook, Wereld Geschiendenis in een Notedop (World History in a Nutshell), which had a chapter about the Persian Wars. Here were the Greeks, a small people but brave, making the supreme sacrifice, as Leonidas’ Spartans did at Thermopylae. They fought and overcame a much larger, more powerful foe – a theme that has stirred the imagination of countless people aside from myself.

Having studied and mastered my craft, starting in the early 1980s I found myself working for the Pentagon. My mentor there was Andy Marshall, the head of Net Assessment and a man who took a keen interest in all sorts of theoretical problems. My involvement with him caused me to try to understand what the study of military history can teach us in respect to our present-day problems; what lessons one could, and could not, draw from it; how to go about doing so; and so on.

Next, I shifted to the place of war in human affairs in general. After all, war does not on its own stand. Rather, it is inextricably linked to politics, economics, social affairs, culture, religion, and what not. Needless to say, the ties linking all these things are reciprocal. All form part of an infinitely complex net. Nevertheless, I think there is much truth in Leon Trotsky’s famous words about war being the locomotive of history. In studying it, my objective was to find out how the locomotive works as well as the way it makes the carriages move.

Finally, I came to look at war in Platonic terms: the way Plato puts it in the introduction to the Republic, the ideal city is not meant simply as a political construct. It is that, of course. But it is also a metaphor for the human soul. One that, being written in large characters, is easier than the latter to read and understand. The same, I think, is true of war. The reason why war is such an excellent magnifying glass is because those engaged in it labour under fewer constraints than people in any other activity, if only because participants have nothing to lose so almost everything is permitted. The result is that it brings out the full range of human potential – the good as well as the bad.

As the title of this book suggests, my objective in writing it was to compress the essence of all this into as small and concise a space as I could manage. This is why it focuses on the 100 most important military events; covers events not just in Europe, as is so often the case, but in various other parts of the world as well; and discusses not just wars and battles but military writings such as Sun Tzu and Clausewitz as well as some broad historical processes that have impinged on military history, pushing it along and being pushed by it.

As Woodrow Wilson, himself a historian (though not a military one), once said, addressing a big subject at length is fairly easy. Doing the same briefly can be very difficult. In fact, it was precisely the difficulty of the task that appealed to me and made me take up the challenge. But how to go about it? Where to start? Where to end? How to arrange the material? What to put in and what, more importantly, to leave out? The following pages are, among other things, an attempt to answer these questions.

Martin van CreveldJerusalem2017

What the earliest warriors probably looked like.

Archaeological finds from Jebel Shaba, in the Sudan, and Nataruk, in Kenya, indicate that groups of nomadic, hunting-gathering members of the species Homo sapiens sapiens had begun waging war on each other.

Evidence for deadly human-on-human violence goes back at least as far as 50,000 BCE. It consists of weapons, such as stone-made spear and arrow points; bones that have been broken, crushed or perforated; and, occasionally, graves. However, such violence on its own does not amount to war. Whether early humans understood the differences between crime, police action, feuding, war, and genocide in ways similar to our present understanding of these things is doubtful. Thinking of it, it seems rather unlikely. What Jebel Shaba and Nataruk do prove, though, is that 12,000 or so years ago humans were engaging in collective violence against each other.

The motives that drove our remote ancestors to engage in war must have resembled those found in more recent, and much better known, hunting-gathering societies. They probably included conflicts over access to natural resources such as watering places and hunting grounds; disputes over women and the sexual and reproductive possibilities they offered; the need to avenge insults of every kind; and general competition.

Normally the warring societies must have lived fairly close together, though there may have been exceptions to that rule. Tactically, conflicts probably took the form of skirmishes, ambushes, and raids. The time and location of some encounters may have been prearranged. Each ‘campaign’ separately was short, lasting no more than hours or, at most, days. However, the frequent recurrence of hostilities meant that, relative to the size of the warring societies, over time casualties could amount to a considerable part of the populations involved. The findings at Nataruk seem to show that no one was spared. In later tribal warfare, though, while adult men would be slaughtered, young women and children were more often taken prisoner. Either way, entire societies could be, and presumably sometimes were, wiped out.

Recent discoveries in the field put an end to the common, but mistaken, idea that war only emerged after the agricultural revolution led to a surplus and made settled communities possible. In other words, le bon sauvage is a myth. This does not, however, necessarily mean that our ancestors were incapable of friendship, altruism, kindness, or love.

The first weapons were made of stone, wood and bone.

The earliest raw materials from which weapons were made were bone (for spear and arrow points), stone (used, in addition to points, for maces and knives), wood (for shafts, clubs, and bows and arrows; bows are a very ancient weapon, going back to at least 60,000 BCE); and linen, hemp, silk, sinews, and rawhide (for bowstrings). The middle of the fourth millennium BCE saw the introduction of bronze in the Indus Valley. From there it spread north-eastward to China and Korea, as well as westward into the Middle East and Europe.

As this list implies, the ingredients of bronze – copper and tin – may be found in many different places around the world. Harder than copper, whose military use was essentially limited to maces, it could be moulded into any desirable shape and sharpened to a fine edge (though some earlier weapons, made of obsidian or animal teeth, could be very sharp indeed). It also lasted longer than organic materials did. These advantages explain why it was used to manufacture, among other things, weapons such as spear and arrow points, swords, daggers, axes, and halberds. Later defensive equipment such as helmets, shields, armour, and greaves were added.

Manufacturing bronze requires quite sophisticated technology. Such technology in turn presupposes specialised craftsmen as well as permanent settlements. Societies that did not form such settlements could not produce it, though they may have acquired the weapons by trade or plunder. In the most advanced societies bronze remained the main material for manufacture of military equipment until about 1000 BCE, when it started to be replaced by iron and steel.

Did ancient Chinese commanders look like this?

Described in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian (c. 100 BCE), the Battle of Banquan is often considered the earliest recorded battle in history. However, over two millennia passed from the time the battle took place to its being mentioned in the Records. As a result, the details are somewhat obscure. Not only is the exact location where it took place disputed, but it may actually have consisted of three separate battles which subsequent generations, less interested in the military detail, compressed into one.

The antagonists were Yandi, ‘The Flame Emperor’, on one side and Huangdi, or ‘Yellow Emperor’, on the other. During most of China’s history Huangdi was regarded as a key figure in the creation of Chinese civilisation. However, not long after the overthrow of imperial rule in 1911 CE he lost that status and came to be considered a legendary or, at best, semi-legendary figure. Among the many useful devices Huangdi is supposed to have invented was the first bow. Climbing a mulberry tree to escape a tiger, he used a stone knife to fashion it out of the surrounding branches as well as the vine that was growing on it. His men, belonging to the Youxiong tribe, prevailed over their enemies, the Shennong. The latter seem to have been nomads who entered the North China Plain from the north and the east, starting a pattern that was to shape Chinese history for the next 4,000 years or so.

After the battle, Yandi was murdered, leading to the amalgamation of the two tribes. Together they formed the Huaxia (‘grand beautiful’) people, generally seen as the ancestor of China’s Han civilisation.

This clash between Pharaoh Ramses II of Egypt and the Hittite King Muwatalli II is the earliest of which we have a detailed account, complete with information about formations, weapons and tactics. Most of the information is contained in reliefs and inscriptions Ramses had made and put up in various temples. Hittite records also mention the battle, though in far less detail.

In the spring Ramses and his army, consisting of about 20,000 men, divided into four brigades with about 2,000 chariots between them, left Egypt. Marching by way of the Sinai and Canaan (Palestine), he entered Syria from the south-west. There he almost fell into a trap as some local people, perhaps Hittite spies, informed him the enemy was still 200km away. In fact, the distance between the two forces was only about 11km. As a result, when the Hittites attacked Ramses only had two of his four brigades immediately available. Said to be ‘more numerous than the grains of sand on the beach’,* the enemy easily broke through the Egyptian array.

If Ramses’ account may be believed, at one point he was left on his own, with ‘no officer, no charioteer, no soldier of the army, no shield-bearer’† to help him. What saved him was the god Amun, hard fighting, and, above all, the fact that the Hittites smelled victory. Abandoning the pursuit, the Hittites turned and started plundering the Egyptian camp – probably not the first, and certainly not the last, time such a thing happened. The remaining Egyptian brigades arrived on the field and counter-attacked. They drove the enemy into the nearby river Orontes, killing many and forcing others to swim across ‘like crocodiles’‡ so as to make their escape.

The relatively plentiful information we have about it apart, the battle is remarkable for the fact that it was fought with the aid of as many as 5,000 horse-drawn chariots on both sides. This makes it the largest such encounter in history. Apparently the Egyptian chariots proved lighter, faster and more manoeuvrable than the Hittite ones.

The day ended with what may have been a tactical victory for the Egyptians. However, they were unable to maintain themselves in Syria. Over the next fifteen years the two sides continued to fight each other in northern Palestine and southern Syria. Hostilities were finally concluded in 1258 BCE by means of a treaty, a copy of which is now in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.

*    Quoted in J. Tyldesley, Ramesses II: Egypt’s Greatest Pharaoh (London: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 70–1.

†   Quoted in M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature. II: The New Kingdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 65.

‡   Quoted in R. Overy, A History of War in 100 Battles (London: HarperCollins, 2014), p. 323.

Homer was blind, yet understood war as well as anyone before or since.

The reasons that led to the Trojan War – the kidnap or elopement of Helen by or with Paris of Troy, the jilted Menelaus’ ability to persuade his brother Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, to retrieve her, and the subsequent campaign – do not need repeating in detail. Suffice it to say that it lasted for ten years before the city finally fell. The Iliad, on which all other literary sources drew, gives the number of Greeks as 50,000 and that of Trojans as 10,000. By another interpretation the figures were 250,000 and 50,000 respectively. No fewer than a thousand ships carried the Greeks to their destination. Without question, the poem vastly exaggerates both the length of the war and the number of participants. Almost certainly what we are talking about is a raid that lasted days or weeks, involving no more than a few hundred men on each side.

The organisation, weapons, and tactics on both sides have given rise to more controversy than can be dealt with here. Perhaps the most interesting feature, seldom mentioned, is the fact that at no point in the story is there any mention of siege techniques: No ramps, no mantelets warriors can use as shelter, and no battering rams. No ladders even. The fighting consisted almost entirely of face-to-face duels between aristocratic heroes who often knew each other by name. It took place exclusively in the open. That is why, in the end, the Greeks had to resort to a ruse de guerre, the famous Trojan horse, in order to get inside the walls and capture the city. Yet in Mesopotamia all the above-mentioned siege devices had been in use since at least 1600 BCE.

What gives this particular raid its extraordinary importance is the great early seventh-century BCE poem that was built around it. Never in the whole of history has anyone excelled Homer – who according to tradition was blind – in describing the joy of war, its glory, its sorrows, and its horrors: the place it occupies in human life. Clearly to command and fight in war are one thing, to put the experience into words, let alone words that will echo through millennia, quite another.

*    According to the calculations of the third-century BCE Alexandrian polymath Eratosthenes.

Warships go back over 3,000 years.

The first naval battle on record was fought in one of the mouths of the Nile, where it flows into the Mediterranean. The details are known from inscriptions and reliefs set up by the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses III. The enemy were the so-called Sea People, apparently a loose alliance of tribes originating in Cyprus, Crete, and perhaps even as far away as Sardinia. By this time they had been raiding the eastern Mediterranean, including not just Egypt but the coasts of Phoenicia and Palestine, for a century past. Some probably used that region as a base from which to attack Egypt.

Having received intelligence about the approaching invasion, Ramses hurried north ‘like a whirlwind’. Next, he says, ‘a net was prepared to ensnare [the enemy]’:

I caused the Nile mouths to be prepared like a strong wall with warships, galleys and coasters, equipped, for they were manned completely from bow to stem with valiant warriors with their weapons … As for those who came forward together on the sea, the full flame [presumably the Egyptian fleet] was in front of them at the Nile mouths, while a stockade of lances surrounded them on the shore [so that they were] dragged [ashore], hemmed in, prostrated on the beach, slain, made into heaps from head to tail. Their ships and their goods were as if fallen into the water.*

Vivid images, originally painted in bright colours, accompany the text.

They show five enemy ships, distinguished by birds’ heads at both ends, and four Egyptian ones, identifiable by the lioness heads on their prows. The Egyptian ships all point in the same direction; not so the enemy ones. Perhaps this was meant to indicate that the latter were taken by surprise. Weapons included bows, arrows, spears, and swords. Meanwhile grappling hooks prevented the enemy vessels from escaping. We also see Egyptian soldiers dragging their enemies out of the water and binding them.

The outcome was a victory for Ramses and the end of the Sea People’s threat to Egypt. But they did not disappear. Exploiting the collapse of the Hittite Empire a few years earlier, they were able to establish permanent settlements along the south Palestinian coast.

*    Quoted in E. Velikovsky, Ages in Chaos, Vol. III: Peoples of the Sea (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1977), p. 69.

An Assyrian soldier, recognisable by his peculiar pointed helmet.

The transition from bronze to iron seems to have started in Central Asia. From there it passed to China and Europe, where it was well under way in 750 BCE. Iron ore was much easier to find, though more difficult to work, than deposits of tin. Iron itself had the advantage that it was much harder than bronze and not nearly as brittle. First it was sharpened to create edged weapons. Later technical improvements also enabled it to be hammered into shape to produce defensive equipment of every kind.

The most efficient army of the period was the Assyrian one. It is known to us from numerous inscriptions (in cuneiform), administrative documents written on clay, reliefs, and the Old Testament. The latter provides the following chilling description of it:

And he [the Lord] will lift up an ensign to the nations from far, and will hiss unto them from the end of the earth; and behold, they shall come with speed swiftly; none shall be weary nor stumble among them; none shall slumber nor sleep; neither shall the girdle of their loins be loosed, nor the latchet of their shoes be broken; whose arrows are sharp, and all their bows bent, their horses’ hoofs shall be counted like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind; their roaring shall be like a lion, they shall roar like young lions; yes they shall roar, and lay hold of the prey and shall carry it safe, and none shall deliver it.

At peak, shortly before 700 BCE, the army was a full-time, integrated fighting force capable of year-round operations. It consisted of spear-carrying infantry, archers, slingers, cavalry, and chariots. The Assyrian troops proper, easily recognisable by their pointed helmets, were often accompanied by auxiliaries as well as men raised in the conquered provinces. We know of captains of ten and captains of fifty. Some were eunuchs, others not. The officers’ symbol of authority was the mace, though apparently not all carried it.