Weapons and Warfare | History and Hardware of Warfare

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The Life and Adventures of Charles Moth EatonSoldier – Pioneer Aviator – Pathfinder for Global Peacekeeping.by Charles Stuart EatonForeword by Dick Smith AOIn Retrospect Air Commodore Dr Mark Lax OAM, CSMThe Cross in the Sky is the remarkable story of Charles ‘Moth’ Eaton. As a soldier, pioneer aviator and pathfinder for global peacekeeping, Charles emerges as a trail-blazer in many realms. His story is intertwined with tectonic world events and a 65-year romance with Beatrice Rose Godfrey.Eaton served every day of both world wars, starting with the Royal West Surreys and finishing with the Royal Australian Air Force. He was a prisoner of war and twice court-martialled by the German Army. After the Armistice, he ferried delegates to the Paris Peace Conference. In 1920 he flew in the first aerial survey of India, after which he lived amongst the Khond people of Orissa.In Central Australia, following the disappearances of Kingsford Smith’s Southern Cross and Lasseter’s Golden Quest, he led rescue missions into the Tanami and Great Sandy deserts before establishing and then participating in the air defences of north-west Australia and West Papua during World War Two. As the Australian Consul in East Timor, he assisted the post-war reconstruction of that war-torn land.In the midst of the Indonesian War of Independence, his life-long experience culminated in initiatives that led to the first United Nations venture to monitor conflict resolution. As Australia’s first diplomatic representative to the new nation of Indonesia, Charles Eaton laid the foundations of Australian–Indonesian bi-lateral relations.The Cross in the Sky is the story of an extraordinary man, told by his younger son—and witness to some of these events—Charles Stuart Eaton.Buy LINKBuy LINKBuy LINKShare this:FacebookPocketPrintLinkedInMoreEmailTumblrRedditTwitterPinterestLike this:Like Loading... Louis XIV presents his grandson, the King of Spain to the Court and to the Spanish Ambassador.The dichotomy of Castile-Aragon could not be summarily removed by the stroke of a pen not even the pen of a Bourbon.The fall of Oropesa in 1691 left Spain without an effective Government. Indeed, it was followed soon after by the curious administrative experiment of dividing the peninsula into three large governmental regions, one under the Duke of Montalto, the second under the Constable, and the third under the Admiral, of Castile. This was little more than a medieval-style partition of the country among rival lords; and since it was imposed on a State which already possessed the most rigid and elaborate bureaucratic superstructure, it merely led to a further round of clashes of jurisdiction between Spain s perennially competing Councils and tribunals. But by this stage domestic changes in the peninsula had virtually ceased to be of any importance. Spain was no longer even remotely the master of its own fate. Overshadowed by the terrible problem of the royal succession, its future now largely depended on decisions taken in Paris, London, Vienna, and the Hague.By the 1690s, the problem of the Spanish succession had become acute. Charles II had remained childless by his first marriage, to María Luisa of Orleans, who died in 1689. It soon became apparent that his second marriage – an ‘Austrian’ marriage, to Mariana de Neuburg, daughter of the Elector Palatine and sister of the Empress was also likely to be childless. As the hopes of an heir faded the great powers began their complicated manoeuvres for the acquisition of the King of Spain s inheritance. The new marriage had provoked Louis XIV into a fresh declaration of war, which involved yet another invasion of Catalonia, and the capture of Barcelona by the French in 1697. But in the Treaty of Ryswick, which ended the war in September 1697, Louis could afford to be generous. His aim was to secure for the Bourbons an undivided Spanish succession, and there was more hope of attaining this by diplomacy than by war.The last years of the dying King presented a pathetic spectacle of degradation at Madrid. Afflicted with convulsive fits, the wretched monarch was believed to have been bewitched, and the Court pullulated with confessors and exorcists and visionary nuns employing every artifice known to the Church to free him from the devil. Their rivalries and intrigues mingled with those of Spanish courtiers and of foreign diplomats, who were collecting like vultures to prey on the corpse of the Monarchy. While France and Austria hoped to secure the entire prize for themselves, England and the United Provinces were determined to prevent either of them from obtaining an inheritance which would bring the hegemony of Europe in its train. But the task would not be easy, and time was running out.At the time of the peace of Ryswick there were three leading candidates for the Spanish throne, each of whom had a strong body of supporters at the Court. The candidate with the best claims was the young Prince Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria, the grandson of Philip IV s daughter, Margarita Teresa. His claims were supported by the Count of Oropesa, and had been pressed by the Queen Mother Mariana, who died in 1696. They were also acceptable to the English and the Dutch, who had less to fear from a Bavarian than from a French or Austrian succession. The Austrian candidate was the Archduke Charles, the second son of the Emperor, who was supported by Charles s Queen, Mariana de Neuburg, and by the Admiral of Castile. Finally, there was the French claimant, Louis XIV s grandson, Philip of Anjou, who claims were clouded by the Infanta María Teresa s renunciation of her rights to the Spanish throne at the time of her marriage to Louis XIV.In 1696 Charles, who was thought to be dying, was induced by the majority of his councillors, headed by Cardinal Portocarrero, to declare himself in favour of the Bavarian Prince. Louis skilful ambassador, the Marquis of Harcourt, set himself to undo this as soon as he reached Madrid on the conclusion of the Treaty of Ryswick. Still manoeuvring among themselves without regard for the King s wishes, the great powers agreed secretly in October 1698 on the partition of the Spanish inheritance between the three candidates. Naturally enough the secret was badly kept. Charles, imbued with a deep sense of majesty which his person consistently belied, was deeply affronted by the attempt to dismember his domains, and signed a will in November 1698 naming the Bavarian as his universal heir. This arrangement, however, was thwarted by the sudden death of the young Prince in February 1699 – an event which brought the rival Austrian and French candidates face to face for the throne. While frantic diplomatic efforts were made to avert another European conflagration, Charles fought with a desperate resolution to keep his domains intact. The news that reached him at the end of May 1700 of another partition treaty seems finally to have persuaded him where his duty lay. Alienated by dislike of his Queen from all things German, and deeply solicitous for the future well-being of his subjects, he was now ready to accept the almost unanimous recommendation of his Council of State in favour of the Duke of Anjou. On 2 October 1700 he signed the anxiously awaited will, naming Anjou as the successor to all his dominions. The Queen, who had always terrified her husband, did everything in her power to induce him to revoke his decision, but this time the dying King held firm. With a dignity on his death-bed that had constantly eluded the poor misshapen creature in his lifetime, the last King of the House of Austria insisted that his will should prevail. He died on 1 November 1700, amidst the deep disquietude of a nation which found it almost impossible to realize that the dynasty which had led it to such triumphs and such disasters had suddenly ceased to exist.The Duke of Anjou was duly proclaimed King of Spain as Philip V, and made his entry into Madrid in April 1701. A general European conflict might still have been avoided if Louis XIV had shown himself less high-handed at the moment of triumph. But his actions alienated the maritime powers, and in May 1702 England, the Emperor, and the United Provinces simultaneously declared war on France. For a time the war of the Spanish Succession, which was to last from 1702 to 1713, seemed to threaten the Bourbons with utter disaster. But in 1711 the Emperor Joseph died, to be succeeded on the Imperial throne by his brother, the Archduke Charles, who had been the allies candidate for the throne of Spain. The union of Austria and Spain beneath a single ruler – so uncomfortably reminiscent of the days of Charles V – was something that appealed to the maritime powers even less than the prospect of a Bourbon in Madrid. Accordingly, the English and the Dutch now declared themselves ready to accept a Bourbon succession in Spain, so long as Philip V abandoned any pretensions to the French throne. Agreement was formalized in the Treaties of Utrecht of 1713, which also gave Great Britain Gibraltar and Minorca. A further peace settlement in the following year between France and the Empire gave the Spanish Netherlands and Spain s Italian possessions to the Austrians. With the treaties of 1713–14, therefore, the great Burgundian-Habsburg empire which Castile had borne on its shoulders for so long was dissolved, and two centuries of Habsburg imperialism were formally liquidated. The Spanish Empire had shrunk at last to a truly Spanish empire, consisting of the Crowns of Castile and Aragon, and of Castile s American colonies.The extinction of the Habsburg dynasty and the dismemberment of the Habsburg empire were followed by the gradual dismantling of the Habsburg system of government. Philip V was accompanied to Madrid by a number of French advisers, of whom the most notable was Jean Orry. Orry remodelled the royal household along French lines, and settled down to the gargantuan task of financial reform. The process of reform continued throughout the war, and culminated in a general governmental reorganization, in the course of which the Councils began to assume the shape of ministries on the French model. At last, after decades of administrative stagnation, Spain was experiencing that revolution in government which had already changed the face of western Europe during the preceding fifty years.The most important of all the changes introduced by the Bourbons, however, was to occur in the relationship between the Monarchy and the Crown of Aragon. In the modern-style centralized state which the Bourbons were attempting to establish, the continuation of provincial autonomies appeared increasingly anomalous. Yet it did seem for one moment as if the Crown of Aragon might survive the change of régime with its privileges intact. Obedient to the dictates of Louis XIV, Philip V went to Barcelona in 1701 to hold a session of the Catalan Cortes – the first to be summoned since Philip IV s abortive Cortes of 1632. From the Catalan standpoint, these were among the most successful Cortes ever held. The Principality s laws and privileges were duly confirmed, and Philip conceded important new privileges, including the right of limited trade with the New World. But the Catalans themselves were the first to appreciate that there was something incongruous about so generous a handling of provincial liberties by a dynasty notorious for its authoritarian traits. Nor could they forget the treatment they had received at the hands of France during their revolution of 1640–52, and the terrible damage inflicted on the Principality by French invasions during the later seventeenth century. It was therefore perhaps not surprising that as Philip V s popularity increased in Castile, it declined in Catalonia. Finally, in 1705, the Catalans sought and received military aid from England, and proclaimed the Austrian claimant, the Archduke Charles, as Charles III of Spain. Allied troops were also enthusiastically welcomed in Aragon and Valencia, and the War of the Spanish Succession was converted into a Spanish civil war, fought between the two parts of the peninsula nominally united by Ferdinand and Isabella. The allegiances, however, were at first sight paradoxical, for Castile, which had always hated the foreigner, was supporting the claims of a Frenchman, while the Crown of Aragon, which had always been so suspicious of Habsburg intentions, was championing the claims of a prince of the House of Austria.On this occasion, Catalonia, although a far more mature and responsible nation than it had been in 1640, proved to have made a disastrous mistake. The Government of the Archduke Charles in Barcelona was sadly ineffective, and would probably have collapsed within a few months if it had not been shored up by Catalonia s allies. Aragon and Valencia fell to Philip V in 1707, and were summarily deprived of their laws and liberties as a punishment for supporting the losing side. It was hard to see how the Principality could escape a similar fate unless its allies held firm, and firmness was the last thing to be expected of an increasingly war-weary England. When the Tory Government signed the peace with France in 1713 it left the Catalans in the lurch, as the French had left them in the lurch during their revolution against Philip IV. Faced with the equally grim alternatives of hopeless resistance and surrender, the Catalans chose to resist, and for months the city of Barcelona held out with extraordinary heroism against the besieging army. But on 11 September 1714 the Bourbon forces mounted their final assault, and the city s resistance reached its inevitable end. From 12 September 1714 Philip V, unlike Philip IV, was not merely King of Castile and Count of Barcelona; he was also King of Spain.The fall of Barcelona was followed by the wholesale destruction of Catalonia s traditional institutions, including the Diputació and the Barcelona city council. The Government s plans for reform were codified in the so-called Nueva Planta, published on 16 January 1716. This document in effect marks the transformation of Spain from a collection of semi-autonomous provinces into a centralized State. The viceroys of Catalonia were replaced by Captain-Generals, who would govern in conjunction with a royal Audiencia conducting its business in Castilian. The Principality was divided into a new series of administrative divisions similar to those of Castile, and run by corregidores on the Castilian model. Even the universities were abolished, to be replaced by a new, royalist, university established at Cervera. The intention of the Bourbons was to put an end to the Catalan nation, and to obliterate the traditional political divisions of Spain. Nothing expressed this intention better than the abolition of the Council of Aragon, already accomplished in 1707. In future, the affairs of the Crown of Aragon were to be administered by the Council of Castile, which became the principal administrative organ of the new Bourbon state.Although the new administrative organization went a good deal less far in practice than it went on paper, the passing of Catalan autonomy in 1716 marks the real break between Habsburg and Bourbon Spain. If Olivares had been successful in his foreign wars, the change would no doubt have come seventy years earlier, and the history of Spain might have taken a very different course. As it was, the change came too late, and it came in the wrong way. Spain, under the Government of the Bourbons, was about to be centralized and Castilianized; but the transformation occurred at a time when Castile s economic hegemony was a thing of the past. Instead, a centralized Government was arbitrarily imposed on the wealthier peripheral regions, to be held there by force – the force of an economically retarded Castile. The result was a tragically artificial structure which constantly hampered Spain s political development, for during the next two centuries economic and political power were perpetually divorced. Centre and circumference thus remained mutually antagonistic, and the old regional conflicts stubbornly refused to die away. The dichotomy of Castile-Aragon could not be summarily removed by the stroke of a pen not even the pen of a Bourbon.“Toter Sapenpost” (1924) (Dead Sapenpost) by Otto DixA man in a trench was almost invulnerable to rifle and machine-gun fire. To kill or wound him with a shell required a lucky shot; by one contemporary estimate, it took 329 shells to hit one German soldier. To clear the trench a hand grenade had to be thrown or shot into it. But to get within range—60 to 120 feet—required crossing no-man’s-land alive, possible only for small groups mounting nocturnal trench raids, and not for masses of men advancing in daylight against a “storm of steel” from machine guns and artillery. Mobility and mass had ruled warfare since antiquity. Opponents were either flanked or crushed. Trench warfare mocked these principles. If, trying to defeat the Allies before the million-man American Army took the field, the Germans had not raised up out of their trenches and taken the offensive in the spring of 1918, the war would have lasted a year or more longer.Mud was the soldiers’ shield. European man tried to cheat death by submerging himself in the “greasy tide” of rainy, thin-soiled Flanders and Picardy. Three French soldiers speak for millions.“The front-line trench is a mud-colored stream, but an unmoving stream where the current clings to the banks,” one wrote. “You go down into it, you slip in gently … At first the molecules of this substance part, then you can feel them return together and hold on with a tenacity against which nothing can prevail.”“Sometimes the two lips of the trench come together yearningly and meet in an appalling kiss, the wattle sides collapsing in the embrace,” another observed. “Twenty times over you have patched up this mass with wattles, yet it slides and drops down. Stakes bend and break … Duckboards float, and then sink into the mire. Everything disappears into this ponderous liquid: men would disappear into it too if it were deeper.”To yet another, writing in a soldier-edited “trench paper,” the mud seemed alive—and hungry: “At night, crouching in a shell-hole and filling it, the mud watches, like an enormous octopus. The victim arrives. It throws its poisonous slobber out at him, blinds him, closes round him, buries him … For men die of mud, as they die of bullets, but more horribly. Mud is where men sink and—what is worse—the soul sinks … Look, there, there are flecks of red on that pool of mud—blood from a wounded man. Hell is not fire, that would not be the ultimate in suffering. Hell is mud!”On his first night in the trenches, Robert Graves “saw a man lying on his face in a machine-gun shelter.”I stopped and said: “Stand-to, there.” I flashed my torch on him and saw his foot was bare. The machine-gunner beside him said: “No good talking to him, sir.” I asked: “What’s wrong? What’s he taken his boot and sock off for?” I was ready for anything wrong in the trenches. “Look for yourself, sir,” he said. I shook the man by the arm and noticed suddenly that the back of his head was blown out. The first corpse I saw in France was this suicide. He had taken off his boot and sock to pull the trigger of his rifle with his toe; the muzzle was in his mouth.The mutual siege warfare of the trenches was a psychic Calvary. “All poilus have suffered from le cafard,” a poilu, the French “grunt,” testified, using an expression for overmastering misery “which has no precise linguistic equivalent in the English vocabulary of the Great War.” To be alive was to be afraid—of snipers, shells, mines, and gas; of drowning in mud, burning in liquid fire, and freezing in snow; of the enemy in front of you and the firing squad behind; of lice and rats, pneumonia, and typhus; of cowardice, hysteria, madness, and suicide.Graves’s great fear was of being hit by “aimed fire” traceable to a marksman’s malevolent intent. The least likely way to die in the war, the bayonet thrust in the gut, was the most terrifying. More rational was the terror instilled by “the monstrous anger of the guns,” as the poet Wilfred Owen personified artillery. Unaimed shellfire was the major killer in the trenches. Under saturation bombardment, there was no escape. For nine straight hours, on February 21, 1916, at Verdun, eight hundred German artillery pieces fired forty shells a minute on the French positions. “I believe I have found a comparison that conveys what I, in common with all the rest who went through the war, experienced in situations like this,” Ernst Jünger wrote. “It is as if one were tied to a post and threatened by a fellow swinging a sledgehammer. Now the hammer is swung back for the blow, now it whirls forward, just missing your skull, it sends the splinters flying from the post once more. That is exactly what it feels like to be exposed to heavy shelling without cover.”Jünger’s image captures the emotional trauma specific to trench warfare. In his 1918 book War Neurosis the psychiatrist John T. MacCurdy hypothesized that industrial warfare was uniquely stressful because soldiers were forced to “remain for days, weeks, even months, in a narrow trench or stuffy dugout, exposed to constant danger of the most fearful kind … which comes from some unseen force, and against which no personal agility or wit is of any avail.” Nor, unless in hand-to-hand combat, could the men “retaliate in any personal way.” Their memories were seared with inadmissible fear and inexpressible rage. The worst sufferers from war neurosis or “shell-shock,” as a Lancet article labeled it in early 1915, were the defenseless artillery spotters who hung over the battlefield in balloons while the enemy fired shot after unanswered shot at them. “Medical officers at the front were forced to recognize that more men broke down in war because they were not allowed to kill than collapsed under the strain of killing,” observes the historian Joanna Bourke. To spare himself, perhaps Graves’s barefoot suicide needed to turn his death-will on a German.Soldiers could look away from terrible sights; there was no escape from the pounding nightmare of the guns. Of the firing of a giant mortar, an American correspondent with the German army in Lorraine reported: “There was a rush, a rumble, and a groaning—and you were conscious of all three at once … The blue sky vanished in a crimson flash … and then there was a remote and not unpleasant whistling in the air. The shell was on its way to the enemy.” What did it sound like to him? “You hear a bang in the distance and then a hum coming nearer and nearer until it becomes a whistle,” a British soldier remembered. “Then you hear nothing for fractions of a second until the explosion.” “The lump of metal that will crush you into a shapeless nothing may have started on its course,” wrote Ernst Jünger, recalling the thought that filled his mind while he “cower[ed] … alone in his hole” during a bombardment. “Your discomfort is concentrated on your ear, that tries to distinguish amid the uproar the swirl of your own death rushing near.” Paradoxically, the shells that couldn’t be heard, those fired from trench mortars just across no-man’s-land, were the likeliest to kill. Terrifying as the din was, men had more to fear from the silence.Artillery broke men; it could not break the trench barrier. A rain of shells might bury a stretch, but not men guarding it. Carrying their machine guns and rifles, they could ride out the bombardment in deep dugouts built into the inner walls of the trench, then surface in time to decimate the attacking infantry. The machine gun, which had necessitated the trench, could not break it. The grenade was “an excellent weapon to clear out the trenches that assaulting columns are attacking,” in the words of Tactics and Duties for Trench Fighting, a U.S. Army manual. Of flamethrowers, exploited by the Germans in their 1918 breakout attacks, Tactics and Duties bleakly concluded: “It is impossible to withstand a liquid fire attack if the operators succeed in coming within sixty yards” of the trench. “The only means of combating such an attack is to evacuate.” Grenades and flamethrowers were tactical weapons. Gas was potentially strategic.In April 1915, the Germans released a 150-metric-ton cloud of chlorine along a seven-mile front near Ypres. The cloud slowly wafted across no-man’s-land, turning from white to yellow-green as it crept closer to the two divisions of Franco-Algerian soldiers holding the line. Choking for life, they panicked and ran, German infantry in pursuit. “We had seen everything—shells, tear-gas, woodland demolished, the black tearing mines falling in fours, the most terrible wounds and the most murderous avalanches of metal—but nothing can compare with this … death-cloud that enveloped us,” one poilu wrote in a trench paper. The Germans captured two thousand prisoners and fifty-one guns but had not accumulated the reserves to convert this tactical success into a breakthrough, a failure that gave rise to the myth of the “missed opportunity.” (“After the war, many of the experts felt that the Germans could have dealt a decisive blow on the western front if they had made the necessary deployments.”) Far along in their preparations to deploy and defend against gas, the Allies rapidly adapted. Within months both sides were using it, especially to deny mobility to the other side. Thus “poison gas, which was supposed to bring an end to trench warfare,… became the strongest factor in promoting the stasis of the war,” and intensifying its horror.What finally broke the barrier was the tank used in combination with artillery and infantry. “The turning point of the war,” according to a postwar German government commission, was the emergence from out of an early morning mist of French tanks counterattacking the German lines at Soisson on July 18, 1918—tanks that rolled over obstacles vital to the defenders’ sense of security. “Tank fright” ramified. It colored what General Ludendorff called “the black day of the German army,” the August 8 attack at Amiens of four hundred British tanks (and eight hundred planes) that punched an eight-mile bulge in the German lines. The British took eighteen thousand prisoners, batches at a time surrendering to single tanks. And whereas eight thousand Germans were killed on August 8, the tank-accompanied British troops, attacking in the open, recorded half that number of fatalities over four days. By neutralizing the machine gun, the armored tank lifted the “storm of steel” fatal to attacking infantry.Ten Australian and Canadian divisions crossed no-man’s-land with those tanks at Amiens. Leaving the protection of the trenches, the men went “over the top.” Henri Barbusse evoked that moment: “Each one knows that he will be presenting his head, his chest, his belly, the whole of his body, naked, to the rifles that are already fixed, the shells, the heaps of ready-prepared grenades and, above all, the methodical, almost infallible machine-gun—to everything that is waiting in silence out there—before he finds the other soldiers that he must kill.”The Germans collapsed at Soissons and Amiens because they had lost one million irreplaceable men who had gone over the top in their last-ditch “peace offensives” between March and July. The nearly four years since the Battle of Flanders had proved the axiom that he who attacked lost heavily in men whatever few yards he gained in territory. On the relative safety of the trenches, consider the contrast between the casualties suffered by the German army in February 1918, when it stood on the defensive, and in March, when it attacked. Manning the trenches in February found 1,705 soldiers killed, 1,147 missing, and 30,381 wounded. Attacking in March the figures were 31,000 killed, 19,680 wounded, 180,898 missing.Amiens showed how far tanks could shift the odds to the attacker. However, while the tank could break into the German lines, with its vulnerability to shells, liability to breakdown, and short range it could not break through them. Of the 414 tanks in the August 8 attack at Amiens, just 38 were usable on the 11th and only 6 on the 12th. As the supple of tanks ran down in September and October the British high command reverted to the high-casualty infantry-artillery assault. Thus when the British “Tommy” took the offensive in the fall of 1918 he had grim occasion to look back on the “victory of the spade” as a victory for life over death.In licensing the spade, the generals licensed survival, a biological imperative that sapped the appetite for aggression. The trenches spawned a live-and-let-live solidarity between enemies sharing the same mud, enduring the same privations, and resenting in equal measure the same callousness toward their sufferings found at headquarters, in rear billets, on the home front, and in the patriotic press—a solidarity feared by the brass on both sides, who, sensing in it the makings of a politics of life stronger than nationalism, strove to break it.Share this:FacebookPocketPrintLinkedInMoreEmailTumblrRedditTwitterPinterestLike this:Like Loading... The submarine was a subversive force. Its ability to hide within the element on which the battlefleet held sway threatened the great ships, the theory and practice of their employment, above all the admirals who had risen in their service; during the 1920s and 1930s these held power and patronage, not simply in the Royal Navy where, for reasons of proud historic supremacy and incipient decline, it might have been expected, but also in those younger, thrusting navies of the United States, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan who looked to seize the trident. All these in the years leading to the Second World War cleaved to orthodoxy.The articles of faith had been set down from 1890 by an American naval officer, Alfred Thayer Mahan, in a series of works extracting the principles of sea power from history – actually a period of history practically confined to the centuries of British naval ascendancy. Mahan placed the battlefleet at the core of naval strategy. By defeating the enemy battlefleet or bottling it up in port, the dominant fleet established ‘command’ of the oceans; and by blockading, that is throwing a cordon around the enemy’s coast, strangled his trade and brought him low. At the opposite pole to this strategy, and generally practised by the weaker naval power, was commerce-raiding, known after its French exponents as guerre de course. According to the doctrine this would never prevail over the superior battlefleet power.The experience of the First World War appeared to confirm the theory. The British Grand Fleet had met the German High Seas Fleet off Jutland and driven it home, whence it had seldom ventured again, while the Royal Naval blockade had reduced the German population to near-starvation, anarchy and revolution. In the meantime, the German submarine or U-boat guerre de course had been contained.Yet it had been a close-run thing. In April 1917 the British government had looked at defeat. That month, in which the United States entered the war against Germany, the Anglophile Admiral William Sims, despatched to liaise with the Admiralty in London, was horrified when shown the figures of merchant shipping losses: 536,000 tons sunk in February, 603,000 tons in March, 900,000 tons predicted for the current month. His dismay was heightened by a talk with the First Sea Lord, Sir John Jellicoe.‘It is impossible for us to go on with the war if losses like this continue,’ Jellicoe told him.‘It looks as though the Germans are winning the war,’ Sims replied.‘They will win unless we can stop these losses – and stop them soon.’When Sims questioned him about a solution, he said that at present they could see absolutely none.Towards the end of the month Jellicoe, believing the government had not grasped the full gravity of the situation, wrote a memo to his civilian chief, the First Lord of the Admiralty, suggesting that it was necessary to bring home to the War Cabinet ‘the very serious nature of the naval position’:We are carrying on the war … as if we had the absolute command of the sea, whereas we have not such command or anything approaching it. It is quite true that we are masters of the situation so far as surface ships are concerned, but it must be realised – and realised at once – that this will be quite useless if the enemy’s submarines paralyse, as they do now, our lines of communication.He went on to suggest saving shipping space for the import of foodstuffs by withdrawing entirely from the Salonika campaign, and cutting down ruthlessly on all imports not essential to the life of the country,but even with all this we shall be very hard put to it unless the United States help to the utmost of their ability … Without some such relief as I have indicated – and that given immediately – the Navy will fail in its responsibilities to the country and the country itself will suffer starvation.This crisis in the naval war did not disprove the doctrine of battlefleet command since the Admiralty had brought it on itself by misunderstanding and thus disregarding the simplest, time-honoured response to guerre de course: convoying merchant ships instead of allowing them to sail independently while attempting to hunt the raiders. Mahan himself had written:the result of the convoy system … warrants the inference that, when properly systematised and applied, it will have more success as a defensive measure than hunting for individual marauders – a process which, even when most thoroughly planned, still resembles looking for a needle in a haystack.In desperation, and in response to more thoughtful officers in the fleet, at the eleventh hour the Admiralty introduced convoys for oceanic trade. Almost at once the shipping haemorrhage eased. It should have been a lesson: at the height of the campaign that April there were on average less than 50 of Germany’s 128 operational U-boats at sea at any time. It was this handful of comparatively inexpensive war machines which had come within an ace of sinking the most powerful naval and trading empire, aided not simply by her maritime allies, France, Italy, Japan and finally the United States, but also by the shipping and shipyards of neutrals. After the convoy system was instituted it was American yards building ships faster than the U-boats could sink them that allowed the Allies to transport sufficient materials and troops to win the Continental war.In November 1918, as Germany’s acceptance of the armistice conditions became known, one of the U-boat COs, OLt. Karl Dönitz, who had been captured after his boat surfaced out of control while he was attacking a convoy, was held aboard a British cruiser off Gibraltar. He was watching scenes of jubilation in nearby ships with a bitter heart, when he found the cruiser’s captain approaching. Dönitz gestured at the ensigns flying from the armada of ships in the roads, British, American, French and Japanese, and asked the Britisher if he could take any pleasure from a victory attained with the whole world as allies.‘Yes, it’s very curious,’ the Captain replied thoughtfully.’A submarine was a thick-skinned steel cylinder tapering at both ends, designed to withstand enormous pressure at depth Buoyancy chambers termed main ballast tanks, fitted in most cases as lozenge-shaped bulges outside this pressure hull on either side, kept the cylinder just afloat. An outer steel ‘casing’ liberally pierced with openings to let the sea flood in and out provided a sharp bow, a faired stern and a narrow deck atop the cylinder; only a few feet above the sea, this was washed in any weather like a half-tide rock. About midway along its length rose a low structure enclosing another small pressure chamber called the conning tower, accessible from the pressure hull via a circular hatch and allowing access to the bridge above it by another small, pressure-tight hatch.To submerge, the diesel engines which drove the craft on the surface, sucking air in through ducts from the tower structure, were shut down, and electric motors which took their power from massed batteries and consequently used no air were coupled to the propeller shafts. Buoyancy was destroyed by opening valves in the main ballast tanks, allowing the trapped air to be forced out by sea water rushing in; and horizontal fins, termed hydroplanes or just planes, projecting either side at bow and stern were angled against the water flow caused by the boat’s progress to impel the bows down. Approaching the required depth as shown on a gauge in the control room below the conning tower, the diving officer attempted to balance the boat in a state of neutral buoyancy, ‘catching a trim’ in which they neither descended further nor rose. He did this by adjusting the volume of water in auxiliary tanks at bow and stern, and either side at mid-length, flooding or pumping out, aiming to poise the submarine so perfectly that she swam on an even keel weighing precisely the same as the space of sea she occupied, completely at one with her element and floating firm and free as an airship in the air. It was an art attained by minute attention to the detail of prior consumption of stores and fuel, and by much experience. Sea water is seldom homogenous; a boat passing into a layer of different temperature or salinity, and hence density, becomes suddenly less or more buoyant, dropping fast or refusing to descend through the layer until more tank spaces have been flooded; when going deep the pressure hull would be so squeezed between the ribs by the weight above that it occupied less space and the boat had to be lightened by pumping out tanks to compensate. Most vigilance was required at the extremes: going very deep the boat might plunge below the point at which the hull could withstand the pressure; near the surface at periscope depth she might porpoise up to break surface in sight of the enemy.Submerged, a submarine stole along at walking pace or less, either to conserve her batteries which could not be recharged by diesels until she surfaced again or, when hunted, to make as little engine and propeller noise as possible. With both sets of batteries ‘grouped up’ in parallel she might make twice a fast walking speed, 8 or 9 knots, but only for some two hours at most before the batteries ran dangerously low. This was her shortcoming: while she had great range and speed on the surface, once submerged she lost mobility by comparison even with the slowest tramp steamer. Against a battle squadron she could not hope to get within range for attack unless already lying in ambush very close to its track. For this reason the submarine was held to be ‘a weapon of position and surprise’.Once her presence was detected and she became the hunted her submerged endurance was limited by the amount of air within the pressure hull, which of course was all the crew had to breathe; as they exhaled it became progressively degraded with carbon dioxide, after twenty-four hours or so reaching dangerous and finally fatal levels. Headaches and dizziness were common in operational submarines, but they were accepted among the other discomforts of an exacting life; remarkably little was known of the speed of deterioration of air. It was, for example, not appreciated that when the carbon dioxide content reaches 4 per cent thinking becomes difficult and decisions increasingly irrational; by 10 per cent extreme distress is felt, followed soon after by unconsciousness; at over 20 per cent the mixture is lethal.[7] No doubt this was not realized, and air purifiers were not installed – although in the German service individual carbon dioxide filter masks with neck-straps were provided – since before the advent of radar a submarine could usually surface at night to renew her air while remaining invisible. That indeed was the usual operational routine: to lurk submerged on the lookout for targets by day, coming up after nightfall to recharge the batteries, refresh the air and perhaps cruise to another position.The submarine’s main armament was provided by torpedoes, each a miniature submarine in itself with a fuel tank and motor driving contrarotating propellers, a depth mechanism actuating hydroplanes to maintain a set depth, and a gyro compass linked to a rudder to maintain a set course. At the forward end a warhead of high explosive was detonated by a mechanism firing on contact or when disturbed by the magnetic field of the target ship. These auto-piloted cylinders, known as fish or in the German service as eels, were housed in tubes projecting forward from the fore end of the pressure hull and often aft from the after end as well. In some classes two or more tubes were housed externally beneath the casing, but unlike the internal tubes from the pressure hull whose reloads were stowed in the fore and after compartments, external tubes could not be reloaded until return to base.While devastating when they hit the soft underpart of a ship or exploded beneath her, torpedoes were neither as accurate as shells from guns, nor for several reasons could they be ‘spotted’ on to the target. They were launched from their tubes – after these had been opened to the sea – set to steer a collision course to a point ahead of the target ship, ideally at or near a right angle to her track. Whether they hit depended largely on whether the relative motion problem had been solved correctly, which before radar meant how accurately the target’s course and speed had been estimated. The most certain data available was the target’s bearing read from a graduated ring around the periscope. Range was obtained by reading the angle between the waterline and the masthead or bridge of the target, either from simple graduations of minutes of arc or by a split-image rangefinder built into the periscope optics. Using the height of the mast or whatever feature had been taken, the angle was converted into range by a sliding scale. Since in most cases the masthead heights had to be estimated from the assumed size or class of the target ship, usually a difficult judgement to make from quick periscope observations, and since there was a tendency to overestimate size, ranges were often exaggerated. In addition the observer made an estimate of the angle between the target ship’s heading and his own line of sight, known as ‘the angle on the bow’; this too was often overestimated. Speed was deduced from a count of the propeller revolutions audible through the submarine’s listening apparatus, the distance of the second bow wave from the stem, or simply from the type of vessel and experience. With this data a plot was started incorporating both the target’s and the submarine’s own movements; updated by subsequent observations as the attack developed, the plot provided increasingly refined estimates which were fed into computing devices of greater or less mechanical ingenuity according to the nationality of the submarine. In British and Japanese navies the firing solution was expressed as an aim-off or director angle (DA) ahead of the target, in the US and German navies as a torpedo-course setting. Finally, a salvo of two or usually more torpedoes was fired with an interval of several seconds between each; this was to avoid upsetting the trim with such a sudden release of weight as would result from the simultaneous discharge of all tubes, and to allow for errors in the estimated data or the steering of the torpedoes themselves. In the British service, where it was assumed that at least three hits would be required to sink a modern capital ship, COs were trained to fire a ‘massed salvo’ of all torpedoes – usually six – at 5-second intervals, so spreading the salvo along the target and its track. In the American and German services particularly, where the torpedoes themselves could be set to run the desired course, ‘spread’ was often achieved by firing a ‘fan’ with a small angle between each torpedo.Few attacks were as straightforward as this description might imply: the target was generally steering a zigzag pattern; surface and air escorts were often present to force the submarine into evasive alterations during the approach. The periscope could be used only sparingly, the more so the calmer the sea, lest the feather of its wake were spotted by lookouts; and between observations the submarine CO had to retain a mental picture of the developing situation, continuously updating calculations of time, speed and distance in his head as he attempted to manoeuvre into position to catch the DA at the optimum time when the torpedoes would run in on a broad angle to the enemy’s track. There were other situations when snap judgements had to be made on a single observation or while the submarine was turning with nothing but the CO’s experience and and eye to guide him. It was sometimes said that a successful CO needed a sportsman’s eye. Like most generalizations about submarine COs, this can be disproved by individual example: David Wanklyn, for instance, the highest-scoring British ace, did not shine at ball games.Some British COs appear to have dispensed with overmuch calculation: John Stevens, the very successful CO of Unruffled in the Mediterranean, remarked, ‘I say if the target’s worth firing at, give him the lot [a full salvo] and, anyway, the DA is always ten degrees.’[8] It is not possible to compare the results of this cavalier approach statistically with those of American or German COs who relied on fire-control computers generating continuous solutions since the three services operated in very different conditions and, particularly with the Americans, the percentage of hits was depressed by torpedo failures. All that can be deduced from the figures is that all navies had a few COs who consistently outhit the average, and at the other end of the scale a few who seldom hit anything. The qualities the aces showed were aggression, determination, imperturbability in attack, and painstaking attention to training. To a greater extent than in any other type of warship, officers and crew were simple extensions of the CO’s will. When he attacked submerged, he alone saw the enemy – apart from some US submarines where the executive officer took the periscope – and it was the CO’s coolness, resolve and daring, or his timidity, exhaustion and nervous fatigue, that decided the course of the action.The submarine, more than any other warship, was designed and operated as what would now be called a weapon system. Except in the US service, no concessions were made to the comfort or even the convenience of the crew. They were carried merely to serve the system, fitting in the spaces around the reload torpedoes and stores for the voyage, in most cases sharing bunks, ‘hot bunking’ with a shipmate from another watch and sleeping on unchanged sheets that became dirtier by the day. They were unable to bathe or shower, scarcely to wash hands and face, and frequently could not get dry after a wet spell on watch. There was often a queue for the fiendishly complex WC in the heads, and even that could not be used when submerged below about 70 feet because of the exterior pressure. Thereafter they were obliged to relieve themselves in buckets and empty bottles whose smell mixed with the confined, humid odour of diesel oil, past cooking, unwashed bodies, chlorine and stale bilges which permeated every area. They were forced to eat hashes of tinned food and dehydrated vegetables after the fresh provisions ran out, could not take proper exercise, could not even walk on the deck casing lest an enemy aircraft were sighted and the boat had to make an emergency dive; and when submerged for any length of time they were subject to nausea, splitting headaches and, if the mind were allowed to dwell on it, incipient claustrophobia. Paradoxically, the sheer frightfulness of conditions and the sense of vulnerability, and hence of mutual responsibility, engendered comradeship across barriers of rank which in turn ensured high morale, probably higher than in any other class of warship, irrespective of nationality. It depended, however, on a good CO; this meant above all an officer who, whatever his qualities or faults, the men felt they could trust.It was a young man’s game. In the British service an officer was judged too old for operational command at 35. The US service began the war with COs for fleet submarines nearer 40 than 35 but many proved overcautious, which may have had more to do with unrealistic peacetime training than with age; they were soon replaced by younger officers whose aggression, helped by radar, was largely responsible for the devastating campaign which severed Japan from its external supplies. By the last year of the war most US submarine COs were in their early thirties, many not yet 30. In the German service a more dramatic decline in the age of COs was due to the loss of men in the Atlantic and the simultaneous expansion of the U-boat fleet; in the later years many German COs were under 25; youngest of all was Hans Hess, who was 21 when he took command of U995 in 1944.Who in sound mind volunteered for the hazards of such an unnatural life? Before the war sufficient came forward in all navies, and it was only necessary to draft a few, mostly specialist ratings. Some would insist they joined for the extra allowance paid for service in submarines, or because they needed the extra money to get married. There were other powerful inducements: for officers, especially, responsibility and command came much earlier than in the surface fleet; for all hands there was the special camaraderie and informality of the close life aboard, and a different kind of discipline, maintained more by competence and self-respect than by mere rank. In a submarine more than in any other type of vessel each member of the crew was vital to the team; a mistake by any one person might lead to disaster. It was in every sense a close fraternity with all the certainties and reassurance of such, bonded by shared trials, miseries, unique hazards and proficiency in overcoming them. In every navy the submarine service was a club apart with a particular esprit de corps, attracting the bright and non-conformist seeking escape from the hierarchy and meaningless apple-polishing of a big-ship navy in peacetime. The future German aces, Prien, Schepke and Kretschmer, were of this type, as was the American submarine CO Ignatius Galantin, who wrote of his two years’ battleship service after graduating from the Naval Academy: ‘I became increasingly restive … I wanted to be free of the dull, repetitious, institutionalised life of the battleship navy, and to be part of a more personalised, more modern and flexible sea arm.’As Galantin hints, the submarine was exciting as a new weapon at the forefront of naval technology and strategy. On the other hand it had retained from the first war the aura of clandestine, piratical operations by such COs as Martin Dunbar Nasmith, who had forced the nets, minefields and powerful currents of the Dardanelles to attack Turkish transports for Gallipoli in the Sea of Marmora; Max Horton, whose exploits in the Baltic had led the Germans to put a price on his head; and from the other camp Lothar von Arnauld de la Perière, ‘ace of aces’, whose record of ships and tonnage sunk remains unbeaten, and Dönitz’s first CO, Walter Forstmann, who stands only a little below Arnauld in the record book.One of the distinguished band of British submariners (now Vice-Admiral Sir) Ian McGeoch has listed his reasons for volunteering:I was a dedicated small boat sailor, and navigator in offshore racing yachts; I was keen to get the early command which submarine service offered; I was engaged to be married, so that the extra six shillings per diem was an attraction; and I had read most of the accounts of the operations of British submarines in WW1.In both Germany and Japan, where youthful idealism was harnessed to a martial ethic, the submarine arms were deliberately raised to élites, their image enhanced by propaganda; in Germany posters depicted dashing U-boat heroes sailing under streaming pennants towards the enemy. Despite this, during the war both Germany and Japan, while attempting to maintain the fiction of an all-volunteer service, resorted increasingly to drafting suitable young men from the surface fleet, as indeed happened in Great Britain and America. But even when drafted, by no means all measured up to the physical and temperamental demands of submarine life. In all navies the submarine branch remained an élite of fit, stable young men from which temperamental misfits and those not prepared to pull their weight were very quickly weeded, or weeded themselves.Share this:FacebookPocketPrintLinkedInMoreEmailTumblrRedditTwitterPinterestLike this:Like Loading... Chastel Blanc: The fortified church and town of Safita (Castel Blanc) in the mid 13th centuryThe great tower or keep (1) of Castel Blanc in the Syrian coastal mountains was a massively fortified church rather than simply a castle. The lower chamber (2) formed the church with a semi-domed apse at its eastern end (3); a function which continues to this day. The upper chamber (4) consists of a two-aisled hall supported by three columns. Access to this upper chamber from the church was within the south-western corner (5) and was not particularly convenient for military purposes, while access to the roof was by stairs against the western wall of the upper chamber. A rock-cut cistern lay beneath the church (6). An extensive platform surrounds the church, and appears to have had a defensive wall which formed an inner enceinte (7). Apart from the platform, the only substantial surviving element of these inner defences is the small south-western tower (8). Even less remains of the outer fortifications of Castel Blanc, recreated in the lower illustration, with the notable exception of part of a great entrance tower on the eastern side of the hill (9). Photographs taken before the modern village of Safita expanded into a small but thriving town, indicate that this formed only part of a complex of fortifications around the entrance to the Crusader town.An important development in medieval castle construction came with the Crusades to the Holy Land beginning at the end of the eleventh century. Called initially at the Council of Clermont on November 27, 1095, by Pope Urban II, the First Crusade attempted to regain the lands where Jesus Christ was born, lived, and died, which they called the Holy Land and which then, and for the previous five centuries, had been under Muslim control. The response to Urban’s call was enthusiastic, and a large army gathered to set out on Assumption Day, 1096. After a difficult journey to the Holy Land, which saw the Crusaders fighting more against the harsh conditions of the Middle East than against the Muslims, the Crusade was successful. The first prize, Antioch, fell on June 28, 1098, followed a year later, on July 13, 1099, by the fall of Jerusalem.By 1101 the Crusaders had secured their presence in the Holy Land. Their initial success resulted to a large extent from a war that was being fought in the Middle East between the Seljuk Turks and other Muslim peoples, most notably the Egyptian Fatamids. This extended war had both depleted the fighting strength of the Muslims and brought disunity in the defense of their territories. For a while the Crusaders met little military reaction to their conquests. However, they soon realized that they would eventually be forced to defend their newly won territories. They would also have to do it with fewer soldiers than they had in the initial conquests, as many, perhaps as much as one-half to two-thirds of the initial force, returned to Europe following the fall of Jerusalem.Eventually four Crusader kingdoms were carved out of the captured Middle Eastern territory: Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli, and Jerusalem. Kings were elected and a European socio-political structure created. In order to ensure the security of the kingdoms against both Muslim attacks from outside and Muslim/Jewish uprisings from inside these kingdoms, two practices were instituted. First, the Crusaders negotiated with the Muslims and Jews for peace. Treaties were made, bribes paid, and alliances formed; some Muslims and Jews were even used as tax collectors and policemen. Second, numerous castles were built throughout the four kingdoms. The Crusaders realized the need for building castles, and for building them quickly, and within three decades after the fall of Jerusalem most of their castles were completed. Of the two practices, the building of castles was the most effective. Treaties, alliances, and even bribes all failed to keep the peace during the century following the First Crusade. But the castles seldom failed, especially in the first hundred years of occupation, and when they did, it took a long time and necessitated a large number of men.Of initial concern to these castle builders was the security of the Crusader kingdoms’ frontiers. Three were especially vulnerable, and the Crusaders concentrated their initial castle construction in these areas. The first, and perhaps most important, was the sea coast. At the end of the First Crusade the Christians had conquered almost all of the coast from Antioch to the Sinai Desert, with the exceptions only of Tyre (not captured until 1124) and Ascalon (not captured until 1153), and it needed to be protected. The second was the frontier facing Damascus. The third was to the south and protected the kingdom of Jerusalem against incursions from Egypt. Numerous castles were built along all these frontiers. A fourth frontier, west of Antioch and facing Aleppo, would also have been filled with castles, except that negotiations between the Crusaders and the Seljuk Turks led to a “demilitarized zone” without either Muslim or Crusader fortifications.Castles were built along all major routes and in every major mountain pass, along the deserts, the mountains, the rivers, the lakes, and the sea. But protecting the frontiers was only one obligation undertaken by the Crusaders, and it was a responsibility that they could not completely fulfill. There was simply a limitation to the defensibility of the kingdoms’ frontiers, especially when so few soldiers were available as reinforcements should a border or a castle be attacked.The function of many other castles built by the Crusaders was not the protection of the kingdoms’ boundaries, for they were built deep inside the Crusaders’ lands. These served as garrisons for soldiers who could be used to besiege nearby Muslim towns, such as Tyre and Ascalon, or to raid neighboring, unfriendly Muslim lands. Defensively they served as refuges against the attacks of strong Muslim leaders, like Saladin, until relief could come from elsewhere in the Crusaders’ kingdoms or from Europe. They served as centers of authority and police posts for the governance and security of the kingdoms against domestic insurrections. Finally, these castles were administrative centers and hubs of economic development and colonization.With the exception of a few castles built to defend the larger towns of the Holy Land, at Tripoli, Tortosa, Tyre, Beirut, Acre, and Jerusalem, most Crusader castles were built in the countryside. It was here that the Crusaders could use the harshness and inaccessibility of the Middle Eastern terrain to add to the defensibility of their structures. Castles were built on the summits of precipitous rocks or next to steep ravines. At two places, Tyron and Habis, the Crusaders even fortified caves. Most castles had thick walls faced with stone. Because their inhabitants anticipated long sieges that might last until reinforcements could arrive from Europe, the castles were provided with reservoirs for water supply and large cellars for food storage. For example, at the castle of Margat it is estimated that there were sufficient food and water supplies to feed a garrison of 1,000 men for 5 years.In general, two types of castles were built by the Crusaders. The first followed the style that began to be common in Europe at the end of the eleventh century: large rectangular keeps encircled by a stone wall. They were built with the same simple utilitarian character and the same solid construction as those in Europe. They were often also as large in area, but usually only two stories instead of three.Two of the best examples of this type of Crusader castle were built at Safita and Jebail and were known to the Crusaders as Chastel Blanc and Giblet. Lying in the southern coastal region of Syria, the castle at Safita was built on a rocky knoll nearly 1,000 feet above sea level. At this height and with the precipitousness of its slope, defense was secured. The keep measured 30.5 by 18.3 meters and stood more than 25 meters high. It had two stories: in the upper story was a large, vaulted room, presumably the living quarters, which filled the entire extent of the keep and was lit by only a few arrow-slits; below it was a hall, also filling the extent of the keep, which was used as chapel. The flat roof was enclosed by a crenellated parapet. Around the keep was an oval wall with a large polygonal tower at its southwest end. There may also have been a gatehouse near this tower, although it has now disappeared. On the lower slopes of the knoll was another polygonal wall with a fortified gateway, adding to the defense of the castle above. It is not certain when the castle at Safita was originally built, although it must have been before 1166–67 when the Muslim leader Nur ad-Din is said to have captured it. It was also known to have been a Templar castle, although whether that Order initiated its construction is uncertain.The castle at Jebail is a good example of a rectangular keep castle, but it is different from Safita in many ways. It was built not on a precipitous location, but at the southeast corner of a wall surrounding a town and a small harbor, the site of the ancient Phoenician seaport of Byblos. It was also much smaller, measuring only 17.7 by 22 meters, with only two stories. One of the strongest Crusader castles, the keep of Jebail Castle was built by reusing large blocks of ancient stone masonry, with old marble columns cut up and used for bonding. Enclosing this keep was a rectangular curtain wall reinforced with small corner towers. An extra tower in the center of the north face guarded the gate. Jebail Castle was constructed as early as the first decade of the twelfth century and served as a part of the fortifications of the kingdom of Tripoli.Most of the Crusaders’ castles were not rectangular keeps, however. Such castles, too small in both keep size and overall size, simply could not sufficiently meet the military needs of the Christian force occupying the Holy Land. They could not house enough troops to stand in the way of an attacking force, nor could they store enough food and water for a prolonged siege. Rectangular keeps often took a long time to construct, and, as they were the focal point of a castle’s defense, there was little protection until they were completed. The Crusaders needed a fortification that was larger, more quickly built, and more defensible as it was being built. Therefore, they built most of their castles in the style of older Byzantine fortresses already prominent in the Holy Land.On their journey to Jerusalem the Crusaders had seen and been impressed by the majestic walls of Constantinople. They then besieged the Muslim-held Byzantine fortresses at Nicaea and Antioch. Throughout the Holy Land they confronted other Byzantine defensive structures, so strongly built that they had been repaired by the Muslims who had inhabited them since the seventh century. These clearly influenced the Crusaders, and they began to imitate them.This style of fortification can most easily be described as castle complexes, although they are most often called concentric castles. They did not rely on a single rectangular keep for their defense; instead, they imitated urban fortifications with large and powerful outside walls strengthened on the sides and in the corners with towers. The buildings inside the complex, none of which were like the rectangular keep castles, became less important in the defense of the castle. They were meant simply to provide housing and storage. These castles were also larger, their size determined by the extent of their outside walls, and could be more quickly constructed than rectangular keep castles.The Crusaders built many of these castle complexes, most of which were impressive in their size and structure. Walls, sometimes double walls, surrounding a large bailey dominated each castle. As they were the primary means of defense, the walls were very tall and made of the strongest masonry. They were also protected at intervals by a number of crenellated towers. Entrance into the castle was through a single large gatehouse equipped with heavy wooden doors, portcullises, and occasionally a drawbridge. Buildings in the bailey varied in size, shape, and purpose. There were halls, barracks, kitchens, magazines, stables, baths, latrines, storehouses, and, especially in the cases of castles held by the monastic military orders, chapels and chapter houses. Most also contained large, deep wells and/or rainwater reservoirs that were meant to sustain their inhabitants if besieged for long periods until reinforcements could arrive, perhaps from Europe. In some castles there were also keeps, built as residences or barracks and meant to stand as a final line of defense should the outer walls fail.The shape of these castles was determined by the terrain on which they were built: the harsher the terrain, the more defensible the castle. Many Crusader castle complexes were on high, precipitous hill tops or ridges. Often a deep and steep ravine or ditch, sometimes natural and sometimes hewn out of solid rock, was added. The terrain also determined that some castles, among them Saône, Beaufort, and Toprakkale, were divided into two separate baileys or fortresses accessible to each other only by means of a small drawbridge. In spite of the harshness of terrain on which most of these castles were located, though, most covered quite large areas. For example, the castles at Saône and Subeibe covered an area of 5 and 6.5 hectares respectively.Krak des ChevaliersPerhaps the most impressive of these castles, and certainly the one most studied by modern historians and architects, was Krak des Chevaliers. It remains to this day one of the best preserved and most awe-inspiring medieval castles in the world. No less a historical figure than T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) was struck by its beauty and endeavored to make a study of it. He described it as “perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world, [a castle which] forms a fitting commentary on any account of the Crusading buildings of Syria.” Built in the mountainous regions of southern Syria not far from the castle at Safita, Krak des Chevaliers was constructed using the terrain to improve its defensibility. It was erected on a hilltop over 640 meters high and surrounded on three sides by steep slopes. Yet its area measured nearly 140 by 210 meters, making it one of the largest of the Crusaders’ castles.The outer defenses consisted of a polygonal wall, which contained several defensive galleries and semicircular towers. A small gate in the northern face of this wall was guarded by two adjacent towers. Between the outer and inner defenses was a forecourt, 16 to 23 meters wide, with a deep rock-hewn ditch in the southern section serving as a reservoir. The stables, magazine, baths, and latrines were also located in the forecourt.The inner stronghold of the castle lay on top of a steep revetment rising from the forecourt. It was large and spacious and contained a range of buildings serving different functions, including more water tanks and food storehouses. The inner stronghold also included a chapel, although whether this originated with the construction or was added later when the castle came under the control of the Knights Hospitaller cannot be determined.The entrance to the castle was protected by three fortified gateways, between which are sharp-turning narrow corridors. For even more defense, on the walls were five massive towers, one on the northern, one on the western, and three more on the southern perimeters. All five towers contained many chambers in their several stories and were probably the living quarters of the knights. They were separated from each other and from the main fortress by a series of stepped bridges. All the buildings in the complex, like the outer walls, were built using the most proficient of architectural and masonic skill. The stone was solid—pierced only by arrow slits—and smoothly cut with some, albeit minor, ornamentation.Krak des Chevaliers was built in the early twelfth century on the site of a Muslim fortress, which for the most part was dismantled, and it remained a formidable defensive stronghold during the entire Crusader occupation of the Holy Land. It also housed a large number of combatants. In 1212 Wilbrand of Oldenburg estimated that the castle held more than 2,000 soldiers, although most of these were probably Maronite or Syrian soldiers rather than Knights Hospitaller. Its location and garrison meant that it became a target of many Muslim sieges and attacks. The castle survived sieges by Alp Arslan, the Sultan of Aleppo, in 1125 and by Saladin in 1188, and withstood further Muslim attacks in 1163, 1167, 1207, 1218, 1229, 1252, 1267, and 1270. It also survived two major earthquakes during this time. Finally, after being almost completely evacuated by its inhabitants, and after an extensive siege, Mamluk Sultan Baibars captured the castle in 1271.After their initial conquests, the Crusaders had limited military success. In time, the nearby Muslim rulers began to unite and threaten the Crusader kingdoms. The first major setback for the Crusaders came in 1144, when the poorly protected kingdom of Edessa fell to Nur ad-Din, leaving the other kingdoms open to conquest. In response, the Second Crusade was immediately called by Pope Eugene III. However, it proved to be a miserable failure. Arriving in the Holy Land in late 1147, the Second Crusaders began to quarrel with the resident Crusaders, primarily over the latter’s willingness to make alliances and treaties with the Muslims, and this divisiveness brought a lack of offensive military unity that ultimately led to failure at Damascus against the more unified Muslim forces.With the failure of the Second Crusade, Nur ad-Din began to extend his power to the south: Damascus was taken in 1154 and Egypt fell in 1168. Nur ad-Din died in 1174, but he was succeeded by Saladin, the nephew of Shirkuh, Nur ad-Din’s lieutenant who had conquered Egypt. Saladin proved to be an even more capable general than both his uncle and Nur ad-Din. When he succeeded to the throne he controlled almost all of the land surrounding the remaining Crusader kingdoms, and it was only a short time before he began to think about extending his power there as well. By 1187 he began to move into the Crusader lands, and on July 4, 1187, he met and defeated a large Crusader army at the battle of Hattin. The road to Jerusalem lay open to him, and the city fell on October 2, 1147. Only Tyre, the kingdom of Antioch, and the kingdom of Tripoli remained in Crusader hands.This again brought an immediate response from the papacy. Jerusalem, the gem of the Holy Land, captured by the First Crusaders, had fallen to the Muslims, and it was the responsibility of the kings and princes of Europe to retake it. The Third Crusade brought large armies from the three most powerful kingdoms of Europe: Germany, France, and England. All three armies were led by their kings. However, despite the royal and papal influence in this Crusade, it also met with failure. The German army, choosing to travel overland to the Holy Land, never reached its target. Its emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, 68 years old, drowned in the Saleph (now Göksu) River between Armenia and Antioch, and shortly thereafter much of his army, deprived of their royal leader and decimated by disease and Muslim attacks, returned to Europe. The French and English armies, traveling overseas rather than by land, did arrive at the Holy Land, but once there, the two kings, Philip Augustus of France and Richard I “the Lionheart” of England, could never agree on any military action. No major campaign was ever launched by the two together, and no battle ever fought. Acre fell in July 1191 to the Crusaders after a lengthy and uneventful siege, but then, in October 1191, Philip went back to France and began attacking Richard’s territory there. Richard campaigned further up the coast toward Jerusalem, but Saladin kept him from the city and, late in 1192, Richard also returned home.With the failure of the Third Crusade came the end of defensible borders in the Holy Land; now there were only defensible areas, all of which were protected by castles. One by one they too fell to Muslim armies. Further Crusades had no better success. The Fourth Crusade became diverted to Constantinople, which was conquered in 1204, but did not proceed to the Holy Land from there. Crusades also failed in 1212, 1221, 1229, 1254, 1270, and 1272. One famous Crusader, King Louis IX (St. Louis) of France, saw not only a large part of his army captured in Egypt in 1250, but his own death in Tunisia in 1270. Only King Frederick II of Germany eventually retook some of the lost Holy Land, including Jerusalem, in 1228, but by this time Muslim power had shifted with the Mamluks to Egypt, and Frederick had no better success there than any other thirteenth-century Christian general. By the middle of the thirteenth century the remaining Crusader territory and castles in the Holy Land began to fall. In 1268 the kingdom of Antioch surrendered; in 1289, Tripoli capitulated; and finally, in 1291, when Acre fell, the last vestiges of the Crusaders’ conquest returned to Muslim control.During this time, until finally forced out of the Holy Land, the Crusaders continued to build castles. But these fortifications, most of them erected in urban areas, were not nearly as elaborate or sophisticated as those constructed during the first half of the twelfth century. Indeed, there seems to have been an air of desperation in much of their construction. But one feature prominent in these later fortifications is important to note. The Crusaders had discovered during their attacks on Muslim fortifications and then later in the defense of their own castles that there were many disadvantages to rectangular keeps and towers. For one thing, the straight walls of a rectangular keep were relatively easy to destroy by a battering ram or siege machine. They also presented virtually unprotected corners to attackers, with almost no potential for flanking fire. A circular or multi-angular keep or tower was more easily defended than a rectangular structure. It presented no unseen or shielded cover to the enemy and often offered no straight walls to his battering machines. It would soon become an important option for European castle builders as well.A parallel history of Crusader castle construction, both in chronology and style, is to be found in Spain. Muslim soldiers had crossed into Spain from Morocco in 711, and by 720, due both to the strength of their armies and to the disunity of the Visigothic kingdoms, had conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula. Only the kingdom of Asturias in the north successfully resisted their conquests, securing this success at the Battle of Covadonga in 722. This victory may have come because Muslim leaders had split their forces between those responsible for taking northern Iberia and those that had crossed the Pyrenees Mountains and entered France. The latter army’s defeat by Charles Martel in 732 at the Battle of Tours further secured the independence of the Asturias kingdom.An uneasy peace settled on the Iberian Peninsula for the next few centuries. Neither Christian nor Muslim Spaniards lost their religious animosity toward the other, but both the lack of funds and the lack of unity seem to have kept them away from major military incursions into the other’s realms, although border clashes and raids were frequent. The disunity in the Christian lands would eventually see a division of Asturias into several separate kingdoms: Galicia and León in 910, Navarre in 987, Castille in 1035, and Aragon in 1035. Initially, this weakened Christian political and military power, prompting fears of Muslim invasion among those in kingdoms neighboring Al-Andalus, or Islamic Iberia.To calm these fears, Christian kings built a large number of fortifications. One good example was Loarre Castle, built near the large Muslim town of Huesca. Constructed by King Sancho III Garcés “the Great” in c.1020 as one of a line of fortifications he built in the lower Pyrenees, Loarre consisted initially of three tall towers tied together and able to be defended on their own if needed. In 1073 the king of Aragon, Sancho I Ramírez, grandson of Sancho III Garcés, significantly added to this castle, while at the same time exhibiting his piety, by attaching an Augustinian priory to the front of the towers, which also served as an extended defense of the castle as a whole. Should it have been attacked, enemy soldiers would have had to fight through the crypt and nave of the church before they could even reach the central fortifications, which remained the three initial towers.Loarre CastleAnother of these strongholds was a Muslim fortress that stood 10 kilometers from Loarre Castle and was easily seen from the walls of the Aragonese fortification. Although this fortress does not survive and has not been excavated, and thus its strength is unknown, it represents a similar castle-building policy held among the Al-Andalusian leaders. They also saw the need to protect their borders from invasions and raids wherever they faced a Christian threat. But slowly the Christian kings’ Reconquista, as it would be called later, began to cut into the Muslim realm. Coimbra was captured in 1064 by Ferdinand I of León and Toledo by Alfonso VI of Castille in 1085. Between 1073 and his death in 1094, Sancho Ramírez, using Loarre Castle as a base, captured the lands around Huesca, with the city itself falling to his successor, Peter I, in 1096. Afonso I Henriques, King of Portugal, with the help of Second Crusaders from England, Flanders, and the Rhineland, took Lisbon in 1147, with these same Crusaders and others from Catalonia, Genoa, and Pisa capturing Almeria later that year.But the Reconquista was interspersed with warfare between and within Christian kingdoms, as evidenced in the military adventures of the famous El Cid (Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar), who fought both for and against the Castilian king Alfonso VI in the late eleventh century. Only with the Christian victory in the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 were significant inroads into Al-Andalus made, and by 1249 all but the emirate of Granada had fallen—although it would hold out until its conquest in 1492 by King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castile.At each phase of the Reconquista, as their borders moved, Christian kings constructed new fortifications, almost always answered by new Muslim fortifications. Often these were built in sight of each other. Soon the country was covered by castles, the largest number of any medieval land. On both sides some of these fortresses were controlled by kings, some by nobles, and some also by ecclesiastics, as elsewhere throughout Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, but, uniquely, some were also built and controlled by the common people.Perhaps no other event in medieval history had the impact on military technology, especially European fortifications, as did the Crusades. Because most Crusader and Reconquista castles were larger and more capable of a sustained defense than European ones, they tended to impress everyone who saw them. This, added to the fact that so many soldiers of different European kingdoms and principalities served in the Holy Land and Iberia, many of whom would authorize and control the construction of castles when they returned home, meant that the Crusader and Iberian castles greatly influenced late-twelfth- and thirteenth-century castle building throughout Europe. This would create a “golden age” of castle construction that produced perhaps the finest examples of what modern students see as the archetypical medieval castle.Share this:FacebookPocketPrintLinkedInMoreEmailTumblrRedditTwitterPinterestLike this:Like Loading... Clockwise, from top left: the Battle of La Rochelle, the Battle of Agincourt, the Battle of Patay, and Joan of Arc at the Siege of OrléansThe long conflict between France and England, to which historians have given the name of “The Hundred Years’ War,” interests us chiefly as an illustration on a great scale of the transition from the mediæval, feudal order of society to the modern, national idea of political organization. Its nearer causes were largely feudal, and its methods were still, to a great extent, those of the earlier period. Its remoter causes, however, and the motives that kept it alive are to be sought on both sides in a steadily growing sense of national unity and national honor. Under the feudal régime it may fairly be said that it mattered little to the landholding aristocracy whether it were under the sovereignty of one king or another. The thing it really cared about was whether its privileges were such as it had a right to expect, and whether these privileges were likely to be fully and honorably maintained. So long as this was the case the barons found their profit and their glory in standing by their king in those undertakings which had a certain national character. But if their rights were tampered with, or if another sovereign offered equal guaranties of privilege, they easily took advantage of the flexible feudal arrangements to shift their allegiance.While this is true of both the countries engaged in this desperate struggle, there is evident by the close of the thirteenth century a very marked difference between them. English feudalism had always differed from that of France in its relation to the overlord. The impulse given to the royal power by William the Conqueror had never been quite lost. The rights of the crown had been steadily enforced, and what might have seemed a great disadvantage, namely, the absence of a large and compact domaine which might become the nucleus of a monarchical state, had really proved an element of strength. For if the monarchy in England were to be maintained at all, it could only be through the willingness of its subjects to support it. Doubtless there were many times when this loyalty had been strained almost to the breaking point, but the necessity under which the English king was put of appealing to all his people instead of relying upon the resources of a great domaine had proved a powerful educating force in bringing about, on the whole, a harmonious working together of the several elements in the English state. On the other hand, it is clear that a rich family property overseas in France was a very tempting prize to an ambitious king in England. It offered him a chance, similar to that which his French rival enjoyed, of disciplining troublesome barons or obstinate parliaments by means of resources not dependent upon their good will. From this point of view, therefore, we can quite understand the energy with which the English kings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries pursued this ambition, to hold and to increase the lands in France which had come to them by way of feudal inheritance. Yet it remains true that while these lands, one after another, fell away from them by the chances of feudal succession, the monarchy was gaining slowly but surely in its hold on the people of England. Further, the smaller extent of English territory, its comparative isolation, and the relatively greater uniformity of its population made it more easily possible for its kings to assert themselves as against the rival interests of barons or of commons. The definite establishment of Parliament toward the close of the thirteenth century offered a point of application for all measures looking towards a wider extension of the royal power as the price of a more firmly founded popular liberty. In a word, by the year 1300 English nationality was no mere dream of the future. It was finding its expression in a popular monarchy and in a vigorous, self-conscious national life. In France a similar effort at concentration of royal power had been proceeding on different lines and had led to different results. We have already examined some of the processes by which the French kings of the thirteenth century had succeeded in enforcing their judicial authority outside their own domaine, while at the same time they were widening as far as possible the extent of the domaine itself. In both these ways the gain had been very great, so that when, in the early years of the fourteenth century, King Philip IV had called upon the nation to support him in his trial of strength with Pope Boniface VIII, the response had been, on the whole, surprisingly prompt and complete. Yet in all the measures of all the kings from Philip Augustus to Philip IV the essentially feudal structure of the French state had not seriously been called in question. The king could never forget that he was himself a feudal prince, a landbaron like the rest, and the aim of his policy was always not to crush his feudal rivals but to substitute himself for them. When a principality of France became domaine, the king succeeded to the rights of the former lord. For the moment nothing was changed in the land except its headship. Its “customs” – that is, the legal status of its inhabitants – were not essentially altered; the same contributions of men and money that had formerly been paid to the lord were now due to the king. Even before such annexation to the crown, it had been possible, certainly from the time of Philip Augustus, for the kings to maintain in the feudal territories royal officials with more or less extensive rights of jurisdiction and of taxation. After annexation the scope of action of these royal officials was simply increased, and they came to replace the similar officials formerly employed by the lesser lords. It is thus almost literally true that during our period the French kings were conquering France not often by the sword but gradually by the slower weapons of purchase, mortgage, forfeiture, gift, or inheritance.The Hundred Years’ War found France in the midst of this slow and difficult transformation. It is, of course, true that the farther the strengthening of the monarchy went, the greater momentum it gained toward overcoming the resistance of feudalism; but the peculiar character of the war, its long duration, the French reverses, and the dissensions among the leaders in French affairs are all to be understood only in the light of this conflict of political ideas. The monarchy at its best, as under Charles V, was too weak to control perfectly the resources it needed for the deliverance of the country. At its worst, as under John “the Good,” it was itself too hopelessly feudal to be a real leader in the national cause it failed so utterly to understand.As between the two powers, then, at the opening of the Hundred Years’ War, the advantage appeared to be on the side of England, – a small, compact, fairly homogeneous people under a popular and energetic monarchy over against a people widely extended, made up of many distinct racial elements, and divided against itself by strongly opposed class interests. The war was, on the whole, popular in England, while the French went into it for the first generation rather languidly and without any just sense of the great national issues involved. The armies and navies of England were almost entirely made up of Englishmen; the French, both on land and sea, fought with the aid of large contingents of hired foreigners. The English notion of fighting was to get the better of the enemy and to kill him off as fast as possible. The French leaders were still governed by the lofty but fantastic ideas of mediæval chivalry, which treated war rather as a game, to be played according to certain rules of honor, than as a desperate struggle of peoples bent on carrying their quarrel to the last extremity. It was only by the long training of the war itself that these notions were gradually dispelled and the French people taught that national unity was the indispensable condition of national honor.The immediate occasion of the Hundred Years’ War was a dynastic one. A glance at the table of the Valois family shows at once the question at issue. When King Philip IV died in 1314 he left three sons who followed him in regular succession upon the throne, and this in spite of the fact that the first two had each left daughters who might have succeeded them. The daughters had been set aside in pursuance of what was called the “Salic Law,” and thus a precedent had been established for all future time. The last of the three brothers, Charles IV, dying in 1328, left his queen in near expectation of an heir, Should this child prove to be a daughter, it was evident that the same question would arise once more and would be so much the more troublesome as the men likely to appear as claimants were more remote from the main Capetian line. In any case there would have to be a regency, and the choice of a regent was felt to involve the whole question of the succession. The male person nearest to the three late kings was their cousin, Philip of Valois, whose claim descended in the male line from Philip III. Philip’s claim to the regency was at once disputed by King Edward III of England, who was the son of a daughter of Philip IV and hence, like Philip of Valois, a descendant of Philip III. He based his claim on the fact of his descent through an elder, through a female, line and maintained that even if the Salic Law debarred a woman from the succession, it could not prevent her from transmitting to her descendants a right she could not herself exercise.If both claimants had been Frenchmen the decision might have been difficult; as it was, the national spirit was strong enough to settle the matter. Philip of Valois was chosen regent by the barons of France and two months later, on the birth of a daughter to the widow of Charles IV, he was proclaimed king. Then came the test question, – whether King Edward would accept the situation and do homage to King Philip for the lands which he held in France. Under earlier feudal conditions homage paid by one king to another had not seemed to involve any sacrifice of honor. The relation was a personal one and did not carry with it any reflection on the vassal king’s duty to his own people. Now, however, under the new impulses of the national spirit, King Edward could but hesitate. Homage to the French king seemed to be, in a way, a stain upon the honor of the English people. Summoned by Philip VI to do homage in person, he failed to appear, and Philip made preparations to seize the revenues of his lands. In response to a second summons Edward came over to Amiens and there, in a personal interview, agreed to pay homage “by mouth and word,” but refused to place his hands in those of Philip and swear to be his liege man. It is significant that the reason he gave for his refusal was that he must refer the question to his Parliament and do as it would have him. Edward’s conference with his advisers, the pressure of Philip’s agents in Guienne, and the perpetual danger of war on the Scottish border resulted three years later (1331) in a formal declaration on his part that the homage at Amiens should be held to be liege homage, but only for those lands actually in the English possession.The dynastic question seemed thus to be settled once for all, and so it might have remained but for a series of events not dynastic and not feudal in their nature, but rather political and economic. These were the affairs of Flanders, which we have treated more fully elsewhere. Politically, Flanders was to England what Scotland was to France, a country bound to her rival by ancient feudal ties, but stirred by the new spirit of national independence and seeking for a pretext to break or to weaken those earlier bonds. Economically the bond of Flanders with England was stronger than with France. The chief industry of the great Flemish cities, the manufacture of woolen cloths, was entirely dependent upon the ready importation of English wool, whereas the business dealings of Flanders with France were by comparison unimportant. The rich and powerful citizens of Ghent and Bruges were little inclined to bear the burdens of feudal service in order to maintain their lord, the count of Flanders, in his normal feudal relation to the French king. Especially was this the case when the feudal loyalty of their count to King Philip VI was met by Edward III with an embargo on English wool. “No wool, – no work!” was an appeal stronger than any sentiment of loyalty to prince or king. When the pinch of distress began to be felt, they listened eagerly to able leaders who were ready to show them a way out. Alliance with England was the obvious remedy, and to that policy Jacques van Artavelde, the ablest citizen of Flanders, was prepared to commit them. It was a glaring illustration of how far the old feudal spirit had given way to the demands of the new national states, that Edward III should relieve the scruples of the Flemish on the point of their loyalty to the king of France by again declaring himself to be that person. Loyalty to him was thus in fact loyalty to France. It was a quibble unworthy of the great days of chivalry, but quite in harmony with the “practical” demands of modern politics.This open violation of the dynastic settlement of 1331 was a challenge which Philip VI could not refuse, and both sides pressed their preparations for war. Indeed, for months past these preparations had been going on. King Edward had succeeded in bringing together a formidable group of allies. At a conference held at Valenciennes in May representatives of the count of Hainault, the dukes of Brabant and Geldern and several others of the lower Rhine princes, the Count Palatilne of the Rhine, and the emperor Ludwig the Bavarian declared themselves in Edward’s favor. Immediately afterward (May 24) Philip summoned the Council of Peers at Paris and with their approval declared that Edward had forfeited all fiefs held by him of the French crown. In a sense this was a declaration of war, but it is idle to attempt to throw the blame of what followed upon either party. Both were bent upon a trial of strength, and it was only a question of opportunity. That opportunity was offered by the situation in Flanders.By far the most important ally of Edward III seemed to be the emperor Ludwig the Bavarian. The outbreak of hostilities between France and England coincided with the extraordinary series of political declarations in Germany by which the emperor and the electoral college proclaimed their independence of papal interference in the regular working of the imperial electoral machinery. The residence of the popes in France and their close relation to French politics seemed to throw Ludwig naturally on the English side. In the summer of 1338 King Edward left the Low Countries, where he had been strengthening his alliance with the local princes and set out on a journey up the Rhine. The emperor, after the great day at Rense, met him at Coblenz. All the electors of the Empire except King John of Bohemia, who was at the court of Philip VI, were present and gave their sanction to what followed. With every circumstance of solemnity the emperor made a public declaration that King Philip had forfeited his claim to the crown of France and proceeded to invest Edward III as imperial vicar. The precise meaning of this transaction is not clear. Edward names himself in documents: Vicarius generalis per totam Alemanniam et Germaniam, but it seems unlikely that anything more than the lower Rhine country, especially on the left bank, can have been intended. The fact is that Edward was warmly received both going and coming by the princes of that region. All followed the lead of the emperor in promising their aid in the impending war, and all were only too glad to take the handsome sums of money which Edward distributed right and left. A few trifling acts of authority in the name of his imperial master were not resisted; but further than this the loudly heralded imperial alliance did not go. In the desultory campaigning of the next few months the German allies made but a sorry showing. Ludwig the Bavarian, a shifty politician here as always, did nothing whatever to support his grand promises, and Edward, fortunately for his cause, found himself thrown back upon the only true sources of his strength, upon English loyalty and English courage.Share this:FacebookPocketPrintLinkedInMoreEmailTumblrRedditTwitterPinterestLike this:Like Loading... Cossacks burn ZorndorfOn August 20, the king’s Prussians arrived at the gates of Frankfurt-on-Oder; Fermor was out by Cüstrin with his army. The bluecoats initially moved to Tschicherzig. Frederick reached it on August 16, but Dohna was still out of the vicinity busy in his dealings with the Russians. The grueling pace under the hot summer sun had cost the army many heat-stricken deaths, and the rest of the troops were worn out from the fast pace. They needed a little rest and the king received intelligence that there were no Russians south of the Warta. There was no way to link up with Dohna at Tschicherzig, so the royal force sent intelligence that the junction could be made at Gorgast. Dohna had marched from Frankfurt-on-Oder in August 13. A timely force of four battalions, along with 16 squadrons of cavalry, all under General Schorlemer, bound for Cüstrin. It was considered essential for the new troops to get there as soon as possible.Frederick lodged for the night of August 20–21 in a suburb house—in Lebus—close to the Russian array across the river. Dohna had kept to the western bank of the Oder (at Gorgast, where he arrived on August 16). Until the coming of the king, Dohna, plus of course the garrison of Cüstrin (under Commandant Colonel Christoph Ernst Schack von Wittenau), plus the dark, murky waters of the wide Oder River had been the only cover for the Prussian capital against the Russians. The danger to Berlin now seemed to lessen.On August 21, Frederick rode out to Gorgast so as to discern what the enemy were up to. The king made off early (about 0200 hours) with only a few staff officers and escorts in attendance, leaving his army to follow at slower step. Had the Prussian waited a while, there might not have been need for a battle.The threat of action should have been enough, but that required time. And time was really the one commodity in the shortest supply. Every day counted. Besides, Frederick’s opinion of the fighting skills of the Russians was low, and he must have expected a rather easy time of the whole matter. Frederick was determined to do battle with Fermor to get the threat to Brandenburg neutralized from the direction of the east for that year. August 21 was spent in bringing the army up towards Gorgast, so that by the early morning on August 22 about 36,000 Prussians were encamped in and about Manschnow.Frederick commented on the neat condition of the latter’s men (who had been largely dormant for a while) in comparing them to his own troops, ragged and dusty from very recent adventures, who were shabby by comparison. The Prussians who had been concentrated there were the sum total of nearly every available fighting man between Berlin and the Oder. The composition of that force was the following: 38 battalions of infantry (25,000 men); 83 squadrons of cavalry (10,500 men); and 194 artillery pieces, of which a high percentage (117) were classified as heavy ordnance. To head his horsemen, the king again had the services of Seydlitz, who had returned at the start of the campaign recovered from his wound sustained at Rossbach. But Frederick’s favored cavalry leader had been whoring with loose women and had contracted syphilis, which made his wounds heal slowly.At Frederick’s command (and with urgency) a particular Russian redoubt—at the village of Schaumberg, a couple of miles downstream—was shelled so ferociously as to destroy it. Simultaneously, he ordered that boats be collected above Cüstrin so that the army might cross the Oder there. The king had already ordered Lt-General Kanitz with two regiments of infantry and the pontoon train forward there to construct a pontoon bridge there. Kanitz received some greatly appreciated assistance from local peasants.The bombardment of Fermor’s works was meant to give him the impression that it was at Schaumberg where Frederick intended to cross the river. It was at the village of Alt-Güstibiese where the king really planned to break the barrier of the Oder. The marked redoubt was accordingly plastered, and Fermor at once concentrated his army close-by, while the Prussians, under cover of darkness (night of August 22–23) rose and moved on Alt-Güstibiese, where Kanitz had been busy. The march of not quite 20 miles was accomplished without a hitch, and about 1230 hours on August 23, as the Russians stood waiting near Schaumberg, the Prussian van—with the king himself at the head—crossed the Oder by pontoons and filed through the streets of Alt-Güstibiese, followed quickly by the remainder of the army. All except for the Prussian baggage train, which was left on the eastern bank, to be placed under Hordt and his Free Battalion #9.Frederick, directly upon crossing the Oder, made for the knoll of Alt-Güstibiese and was there greeted by the poor populace of the place, who kissed his hands and even the lining of his coat. He was so moved when he perceived the pitiful sight he wept. After the Prussians marched from Alt-Güstibiese, they moved some ten miles to the east on Gross-Kammin. At the hamlet of Klossow, halt to rest and set up an encampment was called, and Frederick’s army paused there. The troops were spread out in their tents towards Neu-Damm, where they were to make for on the morrow. Once there, the king intended to send his army across the bridge there over the Mutzel and prepare to sweep the enemy’s army into the very water barrier it counted upon for its defense.Fermor was unaware of any of these proceedings. At the very time that Frederick’s men began crossing the Oder, Fermor was waiting near Cüstrin, expecting the appearance of the Prussians near there.Meanwhile, the Siege of Cüstrin had been brief. About 0200 hours on August 15, Stoffelne’s detachment, some 5,000 strong, moved forward upon the fortress; from Gross-Kammin, the Russians reached the walls of Cüstrin through the thick woods intersecting the Landsberg road. There was no hint of resistance until the village of Tamsel. As the green-clad Russians neared the latter, Prussian outposts under General Ruesch (which had been put out to probe for the enemy) opened fire upon the advancing Russians, believing them apparently to be nothing more than Cossacks. The Cossacks were sneaking around to outflank the defenders. The Prussians were speedily disillusioned by these measures.Stoffelne easily overwhelmed the outposts almost before they knew what hit them. The main Prussian line was anchored on two local cemeteries; reasonably strong obstacles. Stoffelne silenced a Prussian battery in front and drove the bluecoats back from the cemeteries. He then veered his advance towards the right, and very shortly reached the Oder at the northern side of Cüstrin. Here batteries (made up of his 20 guns), were set to prepare to bombard the fortress, while the garrison made ready to defend it. At about 2100 hours on August 15, the shelling of Cüstrin commenced, Stoffelne’s artillery started belching exploding howitzer shells and incendiary bombs towards both the fortress and the town. After three well-placed incendiary rounds, one shot landed in a magazine with straw surrounding it and caught fire. The garrison made a useless attempt to save the place, handicapped by a lack of skilled firefighters not to mention the Russians to worry about, but soon the town was blazing out of control. Even some of the garrison, many of whom were deserters or prisoners-of-war, took the opportunity to break into the town and loot. The whole incident was most unfortunate for all concerned, and especially so for the poor souls who had sought their refuge and stored their worldly goods in Cüstrin “when the Russians entered the Prussian territories and … [were thus] reduced from opulent fortunes, to beggary.” Stored powder in the magazines exploded with a violent fury, burying many who had sought refuge in the numerous caverns under the town.Cüstrin was ruined, “excepting the school, the garrison, church, and the main guardhouse.” In the pre-dawn hours of June 16, the garrison of the fortress of Cüstrin hastily constructed two redoubts to help bolster the barrier to the Russians. Nevertheless, Manteuffel took up a position near Neu-Damm, which prevented the enemy from crossing the Oder. Early on the morning of August 16, Cüstrin’s guns opened upon the besiegers. The Russian response was really only half-hearted. August 17, Stoffelne summoned the fortress to surrender. The garrison commander replied he would defend Cüstrin “to the last man.”The Russians were hampered by their lack of siege guns, and Shuvalov’s unicorns proved really ineffective against the walls of the fortress. Worse, the solid shells of the field guns were in short supply. They would be needed for battle, and could be used only sparingly against Cüstrin. Nevertheless, Stoffelne’s move caused Dohna to move to Reitwein to join up with Manteuffel. On August 20, Cüstrin’s garrison, which realized the little suburb was actually shielding the enemy’s siege lines, took the disturbing decision to burn down this suburb, called the Kutze Vorstadt.The populace fled across the Oder to Gorgast, leaving the town a burning wreck. Much material was lost and a small baby was killed. The bridge over the river caught on fire and burned up. Indeed, Fermor was not even aware of where the Prussians had vanished to, although the Cossacks were out trying to find out. Late on August 23, the Russian commander got the first real intelligence of where the enemy were. The irregulars brought in word the king and his men had already breached the Oder and were racing towards the Mutzel. It was plain Frederick was advancing straight on the Russian army to force a battle. Fermor, as soon as he realized what was afoot, took immediate measures to prepare his army for the trial that was coming. Stoffelne had returned to the main army, abandoning the Siege of Cüstrin.The Russian army was pushed into bivouac posture in the thick woods near the Mutzel (the Drewitz Woods of the Zaberngrund); this being the most readily defensible spot in the region now occupied by the Russians. The army completed this maneuver late on August 24. Beyond precautions like these, Fermor, unsure of just what the Prussian strength he was opposing, remained almost in a self-induced “fog.” “The generals were left in ignorance of his intentions.” The heavy baggage had already been put out of harm’s way, as we have seen. Fermor had brought the kitchen paraphernalia and the army paymaster part of the train to be with his main force.At the same time, Frederick was busy himself. His army was on the road towards the Mutzel, specifically, the hamlets of Quartzchen and Darmutzel. He did not intend to make passage at the places ahead, but to merely destroy the wooden bridges thereabouts so Fermor would not be able to escape across them. The work was quickly accomplished. The sun was stifling and wearing on the Prussians. Having rendered the lower Mutzel bridgeless, the king turned his marching troops towards Neu-Damm, the real crossing point, and the one infantry bridge in the region. Evening of August 24, the bluecoats reached their destination, and the bridge at the mill there. They were five good miles from Fermor’s Russians.A prompt advance was made by the advanced guard to prevent the enemy from taking effective countermeasures. The army, once the initial crossing was secured, would make transit throughout the night. The Prussians now took a brief pause, lasting only until 0300 hours on August 25. Frederick took the opportunity to grab some sleep. He napped in a little room at the Neu-Damm, and was awakened about midnight on August 24–25 by his faithful attendants. When the over optimistic king saw his generals that fateful morning, he is reputed to have said, “My congratulations, [Gentlemen!] We have won the battle!”10 About 0300, the crossing commenced. The infantry, artillery teams and cavalry were able to pass the Mutzel without difficulty. With the crossing wrapped up, the bridge was torn down behind them. The king was guided through the thick woods by a local forestry official named Zollnar. He then donned his sword and made ready for what would be a long day for himself and his army. Fermor’s scouts had finally informed him that Frederick’s army had seized the Neu-Damm Bridge and were rolling across the last water barrier between it and the Russians. He knew that Frederick could be looked for on the morrow and the Russian army was shifted into a new position to compensate as much as possible for the changed situation. A deserter from the Prussian army told Fermor the king intended to attack from the direction of Batzlow and Wilkersdorf. Fermor, unfortunately, did not heed the information. He still seemed to expect a Prussian attack from the north, and, to compound the error, Fermor dispatched forces to make sure the Mutzel was bridgeless.The Prussians had been astride Fermor’s lines-of-communication ever since they had penetrated the Oder and there was really little choice left to the foe but to fight it out. Fermor’s men were short of provisions, Frederick holding the Oder meant no supplies could be expected from that direction and no hope of reinforcements was on the horizon. At Fermor’s back, loomed the vast expanses of Poland, much of it barren.Fermor, minus the detachment in Pomerania, had an army of about 52,000 men with him. The composition of this force was the following: 55 battalions of infantry (approximately 36,308 men); 21 squadrons of cavalry (3,382 men); the irregulars and an artillery train of 136 guns. The numerical superiority of Fermor’s army to Frederick’s was about as pronounced as, say Prince Charles’ superior numbers over the Prussians at Leuthen. Frederick had the considerable advantage of well-trained and prepared troops well suited for the heavy fighting that was about to occur. In contrast, the Russians, despite their dogged determination and a stubborn, unbending will, simply were not skilled enough to hope to overcome the finest soldiers in the world at the time and led by the arguably greatest tactician of modern history.The battle was more than half-won by the bluecoats before the first shots were ever fired. But if Frederick found this enemy to be less capable in genuine military skill, the Russians were by far the most determined foes that the king would ever meet on a field of battle. As for Fermor, once he perceived the Prussians had outflanked the position, he realized there were two alternatives: (1) Either march out and fight it out with Frederick in the open; (2) Stay put in the back country where he was and be forced out by starvation to either surrender or else flee like whipped pups towards Poland, if the Prussians allowed that.Some explanation of the country there in which the battle was about to be fought is needed at this point. Zorndorf was the most important village in the vicinity; the place from which the battle received its name was about four miles on the northward side of Cüstrin, some 30 miles from Landsberg and about nine from Klein-Kammin. Zorndorf lay about the center of the tract of ground between the Warta River and the Mutzel, the nature of the countryside there being covered in some spots with thick woods and morasses but was elsewhere sufficiently fertile to grow crops on. The scene was a clearing near-by, perhaps three miles long by five miles wide. About Tamsel, the woods became thicker, specifically between Drewitz-Heath and Klein-Kammin. Zorndorf sat on a knoll perhaps 100 feet above the Oder; from there to all directions, the ground fell away to lower reaches near the swamps. There was no other significant higher ground in the region, and here Fermor finally chose to put his army on.Away to the western end of the region, the nature of the country changed from wet swamps and great woods to three stagnant, murky pools, each branching towards the Mutzel. The ground inside of each pool rose a large hollow of ground, well-worn by the waters. That closest to the river was known as the Zaberngrund, the second as the Galgen Hollow; both would play important roles in the battle.Generally, the lower, more western, ground consisted largely of swamps, the eastern country was of a drier nature, more suited to human habitation. The battle, almost naturally, would be fought in the latter tracts. Fermor decided that it would be better to fight it out with Frederick in the open. So he marched from the thick woods into the cleared country near Zorndorf, where he intended to draw out his men for battle. This was against the advice of Prince Charles of Saxony, who rather wisely suggested that the army should post itself in the elevated country near Gross-Kammin. Fermor seems to have been receptive to the idea of putting his post thereabouts, however in the event, he “merely deposited the main baggage [close-by] … [putting] the army into a potentially disastrous position.” This was a major mistake. A post on higher ground would have raised the already difficult task confronting Frederick to almost superhuman proportions. Fortunately, for the Prussians, there was no attempt to do so.The Russians were arranged in three great—but irregular—squares which, because of the generally broken condition and uneven ground, were really out of range and almost incapable of rendering support to each other. Fermor’s western (right) flank was deployed on the Zaberngrund, the center lay about Quartzchen, with the narrow left anchored about the hamlet of Zicher. His whole army, except as usual for the Cossacks, thus was drawn out on the squares. Rumyantsev, still blissfully unaware of what had been transpiring, was now cut off from the main body of the army.Frederick’s men had succeeded in capturing a few Cossacks, just before crossing the Mutzel, which made him even more confident of success in battle with the Russians. He was convinced that these eastern peoples lacked the ingredients to be good soldiers, an opinion not shared by Marshal Keith, who did his best to convince the king Fermor’s army would give a good account of itself.The Prussian infantry had crossed the Mutzel near Damschue Mühle, the cavalry passing by a log bridge at Kersten in the vicinity of Neu Damm. From there, the range to the nearest hostile troops was about three miles near Zicher. But the king had no intention of striking Fermor on that side in any case, and his actual plan was to attack and roll up the enemy’s right on Zaberngrund, applying the entire effort on that point. Once an assault was opened upon the opposite side of their lines, the enemy, if defeated, would be forced back upon the nearly impassable Mutzel. This would trap him between that river and Frederick’s army; Fermor must then have surrendered or else faced annihilation. On the other side of the coin, if Frederick’s men were beaten, they could easily retreat to Cüstrin fortress, just a short distance to the south. As one author observed about the Russians, they had to have their baggage/supply train as they consumed “far more provisions than one [fighting army] more than twice as strong.”No battle was required, for the Russian baggage at Klein-Kammin was vulnerable. A Prussian stroke upon that train would have compelled Fermor to retreat without battle. Inexplicably, the king did nothing about the enemy’s baggage, and the guard force was left undisturbed. Surprisingly enough, Frederick disdained a thorough reconnaissance by cavalry just before his troops moved out. A recon was considered a given before a major battle. By a military leader of the caliber of Frederick the Great it might be a gross mistake not to do one. On the other hand, the king argues in his History of the Seven Years’ War he had no other choice than to seek a battle as soon as possible as he had other irons in the fire.Share this:FacebookPocketPrintLinkedInMoreEmailTumblrRedditTwitterPinterestLike this:Like Loading... Hemmed in by the Meitzel River at its back, the Russian Army had no way to retreat if the battle went badly. Meanwhile, the Prussians mounted an attack on the Russian right.At about 0300 hours, the Prussians rose and pressed off moving westward—the cavalry closest to the enemy array, while the infantry followed in parallel marching lines. The direction of this maneuver made it appear as if Frederick was heading for Tamsel, but, just short of that place, the troops turned and headed directly towards the enemy. No doubt it was a beautiful formation.Fermor had been busy observing the bluecoats since they had emerged from the woods, needless to say with intense interest. The Russian commander until then had been unaware of where his foe intended for. The Russian front originally had been facing north, as the Prussian stroke was expected from that direction. By then it was approximately 0600 hours, long past dawn. But seeing the Prussians sweeping on by without motion that might indicate an assault, Fermor finally discerned his enemy’s aim. He made measures to accommodate the changed circumstances, and swung round to face the south. This took a while to accomplish, while the Prussians continued to prepare. Time by that point was about 0730 hours.Fermor had spun round and was in the process of deploying his men into the great squares. His whole force was in this gigantic posture; the army stretched from one end to the other some two miles in length, by about one mile in width. This would be the Russians’ first test with Frederick himself, although Gross-Jägersdorf had been fought with the Prussians the previous year.The Prussians approached behind the hamlets thereabouts: by Wilkersdorf, Zorndorf, and Gross-Kammin. About 0800 hours Frederick’s army was standing in the clearing in front of Fermor’s men. Hussar parties, peeling off from the main body, rode out to deal with any units of Cossacks on the loose; this group headed towards the right of the Prussian army to hold a position from that end. In spite of the Prussian measures, the Cossacks were indeed active. Brave individual Cossacks even dared to ride up and taunt the Prussian soldiers with carbine fire, then made off. But there was to be no firing from the Prussians anyway; Frederick had ordered the soldiers to withhold their fire so as to not alert the Russians to their position.This was a bleak period in the history of mankind. The Russian irregulars, on the approach of the king’s army, committed a number of atrocities, which have really blackened the history of this war. At Gross Kammin and at Blumberg, wayward irregulars sacked and burned the towns, and killed a great number of civilians. The victims included women with children, and the nefarious deeds were not confined to the living. Graves were violated, and the vagabonds “stript [sic] the bodies of General Schladerndorf [sic] and General Ruitz.”The hussar screen, some 15 squadrons strong, was making things difficult for the Cossacks. The latter made no appreciable progress against the foe, and they quickly lost heart and decided to get away while the getting was good. As a send-off, they set fire to Zorndorf before they made off. Ironically, the smoke from that burning village (the wind, although blowing only slightly, carried right into Fermor’s face) served to conceal the mobile Prussians from the sight of the enemy. It was said Zorndorf was burned so the Prussian king “might not cover his motions.” However, Frederick’s men held off on driving the Prussian ammunition carts through the streets of Zorndorf. This was obviously for the possible detrimental effects. Still, this no doubt upset Fermor’s thinking, and contributed to the outcome of the battle.Frederick at the same time rode forward from the main army, to see what state the Zaberngrund was in. Accompanied by staff officers, the king only got as far as Batzlow—at the edge of the woods. A plethora of Cossack activity precluded his further journey, and Frederick returned to the army for the critical maneuvers. He found the ravine too deep, rendering it impractical to attack the western square of Fermor’s army over this ground. The muddy and marshy condition of the terrain precluded passage of any body of organized troops but cavalry. Finally, at about Wilkersdorf, the king found his vantage point. At this spot, not quite a mile from the Russian mass, he studied the enemy and the ground thoroughly to see how to bring about its ruin.After a brief investigation of the ground forward of the Russians, the king finally chose the enemy’s right as the most favorable of the great squares to strike, on the southwest end of the position. The monarch then passed back to the army and ordered the men to form rank for battle. He anchored (for the moment) his left behind the still burning village of Zorndorf. On this flank, his troops were to commence the battle with an infantry assault upon Fermor’s right. For this task, the infantry was halted and formed into attack order, while Seydlitz galloped off to the left rear to take up behind the foot soldiers with his squadrons. General Dohna had charge of the Prussian right; between the Stein-Busch and the far end of Zorndorf, he deployed Infantry Regiments 14th, 27th, 18th, 25th, 23rd, 40th, and 49th. The left, under General Kanitz, consisted of Infantry 11th, 7th, 22nd, 46th, 16th, 37th, one battalion each of 2nd/4th, supported by Dragoon regiments 6th, 7th, and 8th. This wing was placed to the left of Zorndorf, and at the end of the Zaberngrund; in the second line stood the center—which was to act in concert with the left by attacking the Russian positions facing Landsberg—while the right held a front at Wilkersdorf.After his regrouping and countermarching, Fermor placed his troops as follows: the main army was newly designated as the Russian right, made up most of the strength of the Russian army; Browne’s Observation Corps became the Russian left, reaching to Zicher. Towards the Zicherer Heide beyond Zicher, General Demikow led a group of horsemen, including the Horvat Hussars, and the Cossacks, that would eventually take a prominent role in the proceedings.The Prussian plan of attack was to hammer the Russian right square with heavy artillery fire to soften up the resistance, and then launch a sudden blow against it. This stroke was to be carried out by Manteuffel (at the head of the advanced guard) using the best troops of the Prussian army. The right was to do nothing during this assault, merely stand and draw the enemy’s attention, as well as feed in more troops as they were required further down the line. Colonel Moller’s heavy Prussian artillery (of 18- and 24-pounders) was pushed to high ground just north of Zorndorf (20 pieces northwest of Zorndorf, another battery of 40 just north of the ruined place). About 0900 hours, the batteries opened. Initial range was too far. The shot could not inflict much damage, so the guns were moved 600 paces closer. The batteries then started to belch grapeshot at close range into close packed Russian formations. The results were devastating.A. T. Bolotov related that one particular cannon shot killed or wounded 48 Russian grenadiers. This pummeling inflicted major casualties before the actual man-to-man fighting started, but the Russian nerve kept men in the open formation when dispersal to cover, such as it was, would have been better. Russian artillery response was less effective, in part because of the greater dispersal of the Prussian army. For two hours, the exchange continued. The less trained Russian gun crews also had to fire uphill, against an enemy who certainly knew how to wage a successful artillery duel. The Russians had much less success in this respect than on the day of Gross-Jägersdorf in 1757.Some of the Russians really had a desire to “see the show.” “The cannon shot were screaming ceaselessly through the air … [and] many of our soldiers climbed the trees to get a better view of the action.” Seydlitz, for his part, had 36 squadrons of cavalry in position at the end of the left, on the west end of the Zaberngrund, while Colonel Wackenitz was holding a second group of 20 squadrons as a reserve behind Kanitz.After the initial deployment had ended, the Prussians (eight battalions, six of them grenadier units) of Manteuffel at the left of the front started forward just past the western end of Zorndorf (at about 1100 hours) towards the Russians, each battalion following the first marched forward a little to their right rear in the oblique order. They passed the still smoldering village on the opposite— right—side. Eyewitness accounts of the Prussian advance give keen insight into the fact that war, is, indeed, waged by men of flesh and blood on both sides. Pastor Täge, a recent arrival in Fermor’s ranks, described the imminent attack of the Prussians “their weapons flashed in the sun, and the spectacle was frightening. Never since in the course of my long life have I heard that tune (Ich bin ja, Heer, in deiner Macht!; [“Now Lord, I am in thy keeping!”] without [recourse to] … the utmost emotion.” When the Prussians made their appearance, one of the regimental bands was marching right along, playing that hymnal with all the enthusiasm of a parade ground. Frederick himself seemed momentarily enthralled by the music and audibly repeated it to those nearby and to himself. It is a pity that such a tranquil tune and mood would be forever associated with one of the most bitterly contested battles of the 18th century.In the event, the thick smoke from the bombardments and the fire at Zorndorf hung thickly about the ground. The front separated, and a gap was created in the Prussian front as it drew upon Fermor’s square. This would have proven disastrous for Frederick had it not been for Seydlitz. The Russians seeing (or, more likely, hearing) the progress of the enemy’s advance, opened up a terrific fire upon them at the distance of some 40 paces. The Battle of Zorndorf had commenced. Now, as a backdrop of battle, some of the Russian supply wagons, their supply of powder responding to intense heat, were blowing up, adding further noise to a roar that reverberated in the windows of buildings all over the area.The mobile horse-artillery and guns were rushed forward, and two, which had taken up position at opposite ends of the Zaberngrund beforehand, opened a heavy fire. This was pointed to strike the extreme southwest corner of Fermor’s lines, the target of the infantry assault. The Russian batteries, it just so happened, had been massed at this spot, but their operators did not reply with like determination. They lacked the accuracy and skill of their opponents. The Prussian batteries quickly gained the upper hand.In the meanwhile, the advancing troops had drawn within range, and a most sanguinary struggle was at once taken up. Prussian losses were immediately telling, at least one in three were killed or wounded in this early going. Unfortunately for the king’s men, the attack was in danger of being turned back due to the ever widening rift developing among the bluecoats.The interior of the Russian army was already a whirl of confusion: the thickly packed ranks of infantry were being swathed by the accurate Prussian cannister fire—casualties were particularly heavy among the Russian 1st and 3rd Grenadiers—but the soldiers still offered a strong front to the attackers. The horses of the supply wagons and lighter baggage, tied up on the outmost edge of the square, had been frightened by the increasingly noisier sounds of battle and were threatening to bolt, while from the outside of the formations, Prussian infantry poured steady, swift and deliberate volleys of musketry fire right into the ranks of the Russians at closer range. Had Fermor’s men been Austrians, Frederick might reasonably have expected preparations to retire from the enemy. But the dogged determination of the Russians, in spite of their shortcomings as military material, more than provided capable resistance to the best army in the world at the time. Not to suggest the Russian soldiers were less than brave. But the soldiers could only be as proficient as their officers, very few of whom during this period were capable. Frederick was certainly impressed and realized that Keith’s analysis of Russian determination was indeed correct.Manteuffel went marching at the enemy unsupported, for the troops following his, Kanitz’s left, had lost sight of the advanced guard in the prevailing clouds of smoke and dust. They had instead entered a struggle farther down the line; Kanitz’s men, crashing through the Stein Busch, had been become disordered in passing it. By 1115 hours, Kanitz was already out of direct support of Manteuffel. Moreover, as his men had stretched out to cover as much front as possible, this meant no troops were available to support Manteuffel’s effort.Not all the blame for this incident can be put on Kanitz’s shoulders. The king’s directives to him appear to have been vague, as suggested by the fact that he allowed the forces of Manteuffel to get so far ahead. Kanitz himself was apparently more concerned with keeping touch with Dohna than in following Manteuffel. The carpeting of the Russian lines by Prussian artillery had unaccountably ignored the forces in front of Kanitz. These forces, Butyrskii’s, Suzdalskii’s, and Kegsggolmskii Infantry units, quickly made their presence known. Manteuffel was having a hard way to go from a bitter bayonet charge at close range from the 3rd and 1st Russian Grenadiers. It was about this point when Frederick apparently ordered Seydlitz to charge the Russians to break their momentum. Seydlitz ignored the order, forestalling until he felt the moment was right. When another order arrived from an exasperated Frederick telling Seydlitz to charge or it would be his head, the indomitable cavalryman replied through an ADC, “Tell the king that my head shall be at his service after the action, if he will only allow me to make use of it meantime in his interest.”The gap was yawning ever wider. Worse still, Kanitz’s 2nd Infantry failed to keep abreast of the Zaberngrund and gave the Russian horse the opportunity to form a charge front. Being without reinforcements, Manteuffel, after a heavy fight with the far more numerous Russians, pulled back “hastily” from before Fermor’s men, his forward line wavering in the midst of the battle under a counterattack from 14 squadrons of Russian horse. Tobolskii’s Dragoons, supported by Novotroitskii’s Cuirassiers, plus Kargopolskii’s Mounted Grenadiers, led the blow on horseback. The 2nd Prussian Infantry of Kanitz was savaged; it lost some 844 men and 20 officers during the course of the battle. The Russians continued to pour it on until the charge of Seydlitz shortly afterwards. Manteuffel’s “withdrawal” soon became a hasty retreat and threatened to become a rout.While this was taking place, the Prussian left was in the fire along most of the front. It looked like a repeat of the attack at Kolin. The horrified sight of his shattered left wing streaming past him awakened in the king a sense of urgency. He jumped from his horse and, grabbing the colors of the 46th Infantry, tried to rally it. But the panic was too great and the king was finally left with just one battalion (1150 hours) between him and the surging Russian horse. Frederick was probably saved by the timely arrival of Marschall’s horsemen, three full Dragoon regiments, led by the myopic-sighted Prince Moritz of Anhalt-Dessau.The Prussian horse rode through the ranks of their fleeing comrades and crashed straight into the advancing enemy. The Russian horse, stunned by this new development, reeled back upon their supporting cast of infantry. Thus was thwarted an attack that could have been devastating to the Prussians. Moreover, the stroke by Anhalt-Dessau made the Russians insensible to Seydlitz’s nearby cavalry, which was still uncommitted.Fermor’s commanders, the smoke having largely dissipated, sighted the hole in the Prussian front, and came barreling out in great strength, plunging into the rift using both cavalry, which we have already looked at, and the infantry. This attack seems to have taken place more or less spontaneously. On the Russian right the men of the Shlyushelburgskii, Chernigovskii, and Rostovskii Infantry regiments suddenly erupted on the faltering Prussians before them (1145 hours). With no military order to attack (apparently), the rear line of Fermor’s right unaccountably took the forces in attack formation as hostile and opened fire right into their backs. Even worse, the hasty advance had gone no more than 300 paces when the Prussian horse countercharged. Already unsteady from having their own comrades shoot at them, the Russian foot soldiers now had to face the vaunted Prussian cavalry.Along other parts of the front local Russian counterattacks drove towards the Prussian formations. The forces which had driven into and broken through the gap turned and outflanked the Prussians, forcing them to fall back. As they surged forward, Fermor’s men overran a Prussian battery at the Fuchsberg, capturing 26 guns. In the meantime, the quick-witted Seydlitz, seeing the debâcle taking place, took matters to his own—with the echoes of repeated orders—and, decided that he had to do something to remedy the crisis facing the Prussian infantry. He took his entire cavalry, some 5,000 horsemen, and threaded his way over the Zaberngrund towards the Russian right flank.Frederick, seeing Manteuffel falling back and the attack line being hard-pressed, sent instructions to Seydlitz to charge Fermor’s advancing troops on his right. The Prussian cavalry charge, with Seydlitz leading the first wave and Wackenitz the second, went crashing head-on into the surging enemy mass and threw the greencoated Russians back into their square, the Prussians following hot on their heels (1155 hours).A confused fight proceeded on that side of Fermor’s front; the Prussian horsemen hacking up the Russians without mercy. (Quarter was neither given nor asked for in this particular fight.) Johann Archenholtz, among others, said the king, in his thirst for revenge “gave orders for no quarter.” This does not seem likely. Frederick was an eighteenth-century “humanist” at heart; to give such deliberate instructions just does not fit the image. Ziethen’s 2nd Hussars particularly distinguished themselves here; they smashed through Gaugraven’s faltering horse. Any cohesion the Russians on this side had left immediately dissolved, as Seydlitz’s full weight made itself felt.The valiant Prussian horse did not break off pursuit until they reached fresh enemy formations at the Galgen-Grund. As one source offered, “The enemy being much more numerous, it [i.e., the Russian horse] was obliged to give way.” That was putting it lightly! To make matters worse, some of the panicked Russians fled to the safety of the Zicher Woods, while still others took full advantage of the overall confusion to break into liquor cases from the supply train. The Russian army always seemed to keep plenty of spirits on hand, even during campaign. With a desperate battle in full engagement, almost whole units proceeded to drink themselves into a drunken stupor. Officers who thought they could rally such troops were speedily disillusioned. Some of the unfortunates who had the temerity to order their men to do their duty were instead shot dead by the swine. While this was taking place, the Prussian infantry took the opportunity to reform and reorganize. Shortly, scattered infantry units pushed back into the action. The Russian right was in ruins, Fermor had been wounded and was taken from the field, either before or just after this charge. At this stage, the remnants of the army’s cavalry were sheltered at Kutzdorf, where the horsemen attempted to ford the Mutzel. They could not get across as the river’s current was far too swift and no bridge was to be had near at hand. Meanwhile, the slaughter on the right continued unabated.Share this:FacebookPocketPrintLinkedInMoreEmailTumblrRedditTwitterPinterestLike this:Like Loading... Clutching the colors of the 46th Infantry Regiment, Frederick rallies his men in a last-ditch stand on the Prussian left. Seydlitz’s cavalry would save the day.The Russian right was no longer capable of organized resistance, but an incredibly bloody and desperate struggle was kept up there until about 1300 hours when the Prussians finally became exhausted. Kanitz’ attack had smashed through three solid lines of Fermor’s deep front and the momentum there was definitely in Prussian hands. Seydlitz drew back his cavalry to reform them in case of additional need. The Russian line there having been driven in, the center and left were reformed, taking up a second line in front and to side of the Galgen Grund. Browne’s observation corps, the largest remaining intact Russian formation, swung itself in to become the new Russian left, while the rest of the survivors of the morning debâcle became the new Russian right wing. What part Fermor had to play in any of these proceedings is unclear, before his wound. Russian generals would later complain of the lack of orders they received during the battle from their “commander.” They could not move well or dexterously in their thickly crowded formations. But neither could their foes of the Prussian left, who had been heavily involved in the battle and were tiring by then. Frederick, seeing Kanitz’s men faltering, ordered the right wing, which was still relatively fresh, into action.Earlier the king had ridden across to the latter command to see why Dohna was making no attempt to aid Kanitz, even when it became apparent he was in dire need of reinforcements. In point of fact, the right had been withdrawing slowly further and further from the scene of action, just when its support was most needed. Responding to orders, Dohna shoved his men into an assault on the southern side of the great enemy center square. The latter was to use his anchor on the Langen-Grund to prop up his men, while units of Schorlemer’s and Marschall’s cavalry would keep the enemy horse at bay. In the meanwhile, the remaining units of the Prussian center and right, those formations still capable of fighting, were shifted eastwards to the ground in front of the Russian center. By mid-afternoon, Frederick’s main attack pressure was facing north. The bluecoats deployed into battle lines again, while the big 40-gun battery was moved—about 1300 hours—from the Zaberngrund to the Galgen Grund, under the escort of the 40th Infantry. It then opened a steady and deliberate fire against the massed Russian army. About 1330 hours, the firing again became general, as the reformed Prussian infantry, this time from the left, prepared to advance against the new enemy position.General Browne’s men were taking a horrific punishment from the Prussian battery. For two full hours, the shelling and sparring continued. Then, about 1500 hours, the Russians struck. Browne’s sole aim was to silence that infernal battery. His Horvat Hussars galloped over the intervening country and quickly took the Prussian guns, and simultaneously nabbed Kreutz’s infantry battalion. This was the signal for a general attack by the whole of Demikow’s cavalry. Their stroke was initially successful, but the iron discipline of the bluecoats as their infantry formed to repulse the intruders was in the end decisive—1515 hours. Then Schorlemer’s surging horsemen rode them down and drove the Russian riders into the near-by Zicher Woods for shelter.This effort raised manifold clouds of smoke. The Prussians of Manteuffel’s still unsteady command momentarily panicked in the mistaken belief the intruders were enemy cavalry. They insensibly tended towards Wilkersdorf before the error could be discovered. Demikow’s effort had one other result. Dohna’s men were still cognizant of the Russian horse, but the retreat of the Horvat Hussars allowed the freed battery to resume pounding Browne’s men. Browne had been reinforced by four battalions from the Russian Major-General Manteuffel. Browne launched a renewed counterattack, at about the same time as Demikow’s effort. This was one determined stroke.Just past the batteries (which were by then blasting away far out in front of the main army) the Russian cavalry surged forward to come to grips with Frederick’s foot soldiers out beyond the confines of their lines. Simultaneously or nearly so, the long lines of Russian infantry ran out to support their comrades on horseback. The main rush of Fermor’s troops was straight into the battalions in position at the Prussian center, rather than against the flank forces, which were nevertheless driven in against the center. The Russians came on like men possessed, capturing another battery and an entire Prussian battalion. So from about 1430 hours, the battle here largely degenerated into a confused slaughter.The Prussian center, hit by the enemy in this fierce assault, rolled back, the units showing an unsteadiness unusual for Prussian troops. They fell back forthwith and not until they reached Wilkersdorf, more than a mile from the scene, were they finally rallied by their officers. Their brethren on the flanks, fortunately for the Prussian cause, were better able to withstand the enemy’s stroke. For the most part, the latter managed to hold their ground against Fermor’s strong counterattack. Seydlitz, in the midst of this mess, came on once more (about 1530 hours): he had rested and reassembled his troopers, bringing up the reserves (giving him a grand total of 61 squadrons ready for orders), now once again the indomitable cavalry leader prepared again to take matters to his own. Seydlitz swept forward into the milling Russian mass from front and rear, rode down the enemy and drove them back upon the Mutzel and Quartzchen beyond.Now, once again, Dohna was making his presence felt. His troops, plus the survivors of Kanitz, some 900 strong, reinvigorated by the sight of Seydlitz’s magnificent cavalry assault, surged forward (about 1530 hours) with bayonets at the ready into the tumbling, utterly decimated enemy lines. But Dohna’s first stroke hit the packed Russian line a glancing blow, and his men momentarily wavered. This was a period of vulnerability. Fortunately, Schorlemer’s horsemen were able to keep rank for the more than 3/4 of an hour necessary to recover. Precious time to get matters straight. Prussian guns, brought forward on the run, opened a savage fire and, at approximately 1635 hours, the bluecoats went back to the attack. This stroke, better supported and prepared, proved the finish. Browne’s men held rank for a time, and then lost all cohesion. By 1715 hours, the Russian guns were silenced as they were overrun, their operators killed or captured in the process. Now was the time Dohna looked for, the Prussian cavalry “should” have launched a decisive attack. But Seydlitz’s men were done in, and Schorlemer’s horse was shaken by its previous efforts. No cavalry stroke came. The situation was still bad enough for the Russians. Georg Browne fell severely wounded in this final showdown; he and “Colonel Soltikow [Soltikov] were taken prisoners by some hussars.”The Russians were slaughtered like pigs in a pen, but they did not run. They stood to their duty, and were often cut down where they were. By a little past 1600 hours, organized resistance virtually ceased, as the slow destruction of the Russian army started. I will spare the reader the details; suffice it to say that more blood was spilled that day than on any European battlefield in half a century. At Zorndorf, the Prussians discovered the Russian pay chest, valued by Lloyd at £160,000 in 1780 money.After the battle, and with a misguided sense of justice, St. Petersburg blamed their own army for the sacking of the pay chest, when this nefarious deed was committed by Prussian cavalry alone. The details of this whole business are very disturbing. Russian soldiers were even individually frisked for the missing coins, and a communiqué from home accused the whole army of drinking on the job, even of “wanton cowardice” in the face of the dreaded Prussian king and his legions.At the event, the Russians could not flee. Indeed, how could they have gotten away? Many of them “attempted” to cross the flowing waters of the Mutzel, by now running red with blood, but could not make it and were swallowed, man and beast alike, in the oozy marshes near the river. Meanwhile, the Prussians were drawing back again and again to rest, while their foes, packed often like sardines in a can, had not even the luxury of freeness of movement. A lone body of Fermor’s men, gathered up from among the remnants of the units, were put under Demikow. This force managed to move back into the hollows where their army had stood. Fermor, apparently patched up, was back by then. He assembled what formations could still offer an organized front—on the Galgen Grund. These hardy units included the famous Smolensk and Kazan Musketeers. There, surrounded by a dreadful number of dead and wounded countrymen and Prussians, Demikow made preparations to defend the withdrawal of the army, as soon as it was possible. He reached his destination just as dusk was falling, the main knoll now the key to the battlefield. Nearby, the broken remains of the badly used Russian formations could offer little tangible support to Demikow.As for the Cossacks, organized they could have proven invaluable at this stage of the battle. Instead, they were busy rummaging through the paraphernalia they found on the battlefield, from both friend and foe. Lost in the joy of plunder, the Cossacks were useless for salvaging the lost battle.Frederick, noticing the small organized enemy force forming up in its hollow just when Russian resistance was supposed to be largely at an end, instantly—about 1900 hours—ordered Forcade with the 23rd Infantry, which had performed commendably during the battle, to march to attack Demikow’s force from the front. General Samuel Carl von Rautter’s 4th Infantry and the rest of the Prussian center (shaken though it was), was to move round and encircle the flanks. The Russians with Demikow responded to the Prussian advance with some artillery shelling, which threw panic into Rautter’s men, who flew wildly to the rear and were not rallied again that day. In fairness, it must be admitted the 4th Infantry suffered heavily at Zorndorf. The tally was 28 killed, 206 wounded, and 176 “missing or captured.” The 11th Infantry of Lt.-Gen. Below was another of those battered units. Its tally at Zorndorf was 707 men and 19 officers. Forcade, from the distance, opened up with his guns in reply (perhaps it had been one of his salvoes that had panicked Rautter’s troops in the first place), but did not attack, as he now had no support. The enemy replied with their guns, but Demikow did not withdraw.Forcade kept his cool; he ordered his troops to deploy while the gunners kept up the involved work of hammering the Russian lines. However, there was to be no further developing of the attack, as the king soon sent a courier to Forcade to leave Demikow alone. The Prussians withdrew towards the main army. For the shameful conduct of his men, Rautter was relieved of his command after the battle and replaced by General Georg Friedrich von Kleist. The main mass of the Russians fell back but slowly, Fermor finally regained control of his army, but far too late. He could now do nothing to reform it and even some of the battlefield was fully in the hands of the Prussians. Frederick’s men dealt with the roving bands of the Cossacks in a heartless—but effective—way, getting in a bit of revenge for the atrocities of the Russians. In one incident, the hussars surrounded one barn near Zichar and burned it down, killing 420 Cossacks that were trapped inside. Archenholtz mentions the deed, and even says the number “was near a thousand.”In the meantime, the coming of night and the end of the battle (which was effectively over by about 1700 hours) brought about preparations for encampment. Frederick ordered his men to pitch their tents and put into bivouac for the night in two lines of rank. This was north to south, with his tent placed in the first row, while guards were posted and parties pushed out to probe the woods and scout out Fermor’s new position, now beyond the roads off in the distance. The sheer exhaustion of the Prussians had allowed Fermor to disengage his army from the battle. The latter, during the course of the night of August 25–26, gradually reassembled his army in some order. The men, now ranked in a loose marching order, then moved towards the southwest far to the west of the Zaberngrund into the Drewitz Heath (still on that side of the Oder); there, hidden among the dense patches of forests, which offered cover from the preying eyes of the enemy’s hussars and providing protection from a surprise Prussian attack, Fermor’s thoroughly worn out troops finally found time for sleep.Within the gloomy, dejected atmosphere of defeat prevailing in the Russian camp that night, there were fewer than 29,000 fit men after the bloody battle. These men were scattered around the countryside in the thick woods of the region. This was not exactly the way Fermor anticipated his invasion of Brandenburg would turn out. His men had been weakened by the many hours of heavy fighting, some units had been almost totally wiped out, others were scattered and often their very own officers, if they were still in a position to care, did not know where they were. Frederick, who had brought a somewhat smaller force to the battle, had about 18,000 fit men in the ranks that night.He had attacked, and with great effort, overcome the very formidable Russian army, but he had had to pay a big price for that “privilege.” Reports that the enemy had marched off were received throughout the night by the Prussians. They, too, however, were waiting for the dawn. General Peter Ivanovitch Panin was bold enough to say, although the Russian array had indeed retained largely the field of battle, “it was either dead, wounded or drunk.”Early the following morning, August 26, Fermor rose from his encampment and marched back beyond the Zaberngrund, where he halted and formed his men into line-of-battle. The Russian commander sent a request to the Prussian commander opposite to him (Dohna) for a three-day truce. He wanted to utilize the time to bury the dead and help the wounded. Among the latter was General Browne, who was in desperate need of medical attention. But Dohna rejected the request on the premise that it was customary in military history for the victor of a battle to ask for a truce and he certainly did not want to give Fermor the impression Zorndorf was a Russian victory.Dohna was quick to mention the misdeeds committed against innocents. Nevertheless, he did acknowledge Browne’s need for assistance and offered an accommodation. It was all academic, though, for before a reply could be definitely received (raising the possibility this was a mere ruse), Fermor drew out his front with his army facing the battlefield to the east. Unlimbering his guns, the Russian commander commenced a cannonade across the field upon the Prussians. The range was too great to accomplish anything direct except to show the foe the Russian army still had fight left in it. As proof, the king rode out early that morning to scout Fermor’s latest movements. The trip was uneventful until he reached the village of Zorndorf. Then an enemy of unknown strength fired at him, nearly taking out Frederick. Both sides opened up with their guns, possibly leading to the renewal of the fighting.The Prussian response was swift, the king’s men drew out in front of their bivouac and forming into battle order replied with their big guns, giving an appropriate answer. Men on both sides urged attack on their leaders, but exhaustion from the heavy fighting of the previous day as well as a critical shortage of ammunition stifled any chance of attack by either side. At about 1130 hours, the Prussians, seeing nothing coming from Fermor’s quarter, marched back to their tents, leaving the artillery to keep up the exchange with the enemy.Late the previous night, Prussian hussars had ridden straight into Fermor’s heavy baggage train at Klein-Kammin. The hussars took their time and plundered the train. Now, in the daylight, with Frederick at Zorndorf and thus between Fermor and his train, it would have been advisable for the king to march and stomp this train before Fermor could lift a finger to rescue it. This would have been decisive, for with his baggage gone, the Russian commander would have been in a big hurry to return to Poland. Inexplicably, nothing of the kind was forthcoming. Perhaps Frederick did not consider it important enough. He may have felt that Fermor was already beaten, so the thing was not worth the effort. Whatever the cause, the Russian baggage was left without further disturbance.Back at the field, the Russian bombardment gradually calmed down, and darkness fell upon the tortured field. About 2300 hours, the Russian army started to move through the woods leading to Tamsel and the road to Klein-Kammin. As he drew away, Fermor ordered a renewed shelling laid down to conceal his retreat. One of these latter rounds blew up a carriage parked outside the king’s tent. The smoke of the cannonading combined with a thick fog arising from the Oder served to conceal the Russian withdrawal.The Prussians were unaware of what was happening until the enemy had already gotten clean away to Klein-Kammin and were preparing for breakfast. Finally Frederick’s reconnaissance parties detected the Russian maneuver, and he at once set off in pursuit. When the king’s men reached the vicinity of the enemy’s encampment, Fermor was already secure behind his redoubts and had his artillery train parked with unlit fuses set. Frederick chose not to attack the Russian position, which was probably a very wise move, and settled for a peaceful withdrawal back to his own camp. So confident was Fermor in the capabilities of his post that, beaten at Zorndorf though he may have been, it was not until August 31 that he abandoned Klein-Kammin and started back towards Landsberg.Frederick, one among many on the Prussian side, was glad to see the Russians go, and did not consider a long-range pursuit using the main Prussian army. The Russians had proven themselves to be worthy opponents. Worthy opponents indeed. In fact, “[The Russians] sustained a slaughter that would have confounded and dispersed the compleatest [sic] veterans.” Three days after Fermor’s final retreat (September 2) the Prussian king gathered his troops and marched towards Saxony to see to the situation in that province. He did see good to detach Dohna with a large detachment—21 battalions and 35 squadrons, some 17,000 men—to go into Fermor’s rear and help see him go. Dohna at once took up his job.Thus closed the story of the Battle of Zorndorf, the hardest fought battle of the Seven Years’ War, and one of the worst of the entire eighteenth century. The casualties reflected that singular fact: Fermor lost 7,990 killed/13,539 wounded and missing; a total of 21,529, nearly half of the army he had dragged to Zorndorf. The beaten side also lost 103 guns and 27 standards, meaningless compared to the human suffering. Frederick’s army suffered as well, although not as severely. Prussian losses were 3,680 killed, above a thousand men missing from the ranks (presumed dead /deserted/captured); along with the wounded, approximately 11,390 men from all causes. Thus nearly four in ten of the Prussians present at Zorndorf were casualties.Share this:FacebookPocketPrintLinkedInMoreEmailTumblrRedditTwitterPinterestLike this:Like Loading... 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