Andean Rebellion of the Eighteenth Century

Micaela Bastidas

Role of women in eighteenth-century Andean rebellions against the Spanish. The eighteenth century in the Andes has been called the age of Andean rebellion. Starting in 1730 with a rebellion in Cochabamba, the era was marked by numerous localized village revolts, insurrections, and protests, culminating in the firestorm of the Great Rebellion of 1780–1782. This violent upheaval in southern Peru and territories in present-day Bolivia and northern Chile, according to probably exaggerated contemporary estimates, left more than 100,000 dead. The rebellion comprised two large insurgencies, which gradually merged during the first half of 1781: the Túpac Amaru uprising in southern Peru and the Túpac Catari uprising in Charcas (present-day Bolivia). Women played a central role in the Great Rebellion, as both protagonists and victims. The participation of rebel women in these insurgencies often stemmed from their insertion into the kinship network of a male insurgent leader, but they led as well as followed, and some acted entirely of their own volition. That they were able to do so owed much to the remarkable relative freedom that rural, especially indigenous, women enjoyed in eighteenth century rural Andean society.

After two centuries of colonial rule, Andean women of the eighteenth century, despite legal provisions that ostensibly circumscribed their freedom of action, were deeply enmeshed in all areas of economic and social life. Restrictions bore more heavily on elite Hispanic women than on their indigenous or mixed-race counterparts. The exceptions to this rule were female slaves, as distinct from free blacks; the conditions in which the slaves lived ranged from poor to appalling. Yet here, too, ways were found to navigate legal prohibitions to one’s own advantage. Domestic slaves, particularly those in urban areas, often enjoyed a fair measure of de facto liberty, at least in comparison to their counterparts on rural haciendas and coastal plantations, whose living conditions were often dire.

Women immersed themselves fully in productive and commercial endeavors, despite ostensibly being severely restricted by law from the freedom to work in a trade or to engage in commerce. Marriage, of course, was the most viable way of life for women of the time, but numerous middle- and lower-class Hispanic women earned their daily bread as market traders or tailors, by making and renting festive costumes, by conducting long-distance commerce, and as petty rentières and money lenders. Among the upper tiers of society, not a few women held sway over family haciendas and estancia operations; others ran textile manufactories both large and small. From surviving notarized testaments, it is evident that many such women accumulated impressive fortunes and exercised de facto influence, both over their extended families and within colonial society.

Away from the cities, rural women, especially indigenous women, appear to have had fewer constraints. It was among the overwhelmingly more numerous indigenous population that women came to exercise an influence that took them to war in roles ranging from leaders (cacicas, or female chiefs) to camp followers (rabanas). Rural areas, however far-flung, did have strong links to the cities; members of the indigenous communities realized that cities offered a chance to market their produce and a place where they might find work. It was the city that provided an opportunity for women to become wage earners. This was not a woman’s individual decision, but a collective community, or at least familial, strategy to earn money for taxes and to obtain merchandise and foodstuff otherwise unavailable through subsistence farming and village markets. Urban domestic service in the coastal cities depended heavily on slave or free black workers, but in the highland cities such as La Paz and Cuzco, indigenous servants were the norm; young indigenous servant women, in particular, were ubiquitous in urban households. Indigenous and mixed-race women (castas, mestizas, mulattas, cholas, pardas) had a salient presence in late colonial protests, whether violent or peaceful.

In both cities and the country, indigenous and caste women shared the general malaise that led to the outbreak of the Great Rebellion of 1780–1782 in the southern Andes. Three women in particular stood out as leaders in 1780–1781: Micaela Bastidas, wife of José Gabriel Túpac Amaru; Bartolina Sisa, wife of Túpac Catari; and Túpac Catari’s sister, Gregoria Apasa, who upon becoming the consort (amante) of Andrés Túpac Amaru, helped to unify the two insurgencies following the capture and execution of her brother. These three consorts were more than the “women behind the throne.” They played an active role that perhaps owed more to indigenous understandings of shared familial or clan responsibilities than to European notions of patriarchal leadership. In rural society, female authority was more pronounced among the upper tiers of indigenous society, manifest in the widespread phenomenon of female incumbency of the indigenous chieftainships (cacicazgos). These were the cacicas, whose authority spanned the full gamut of functions associated with this office. Their authority ranged from sole responsibility or shared responsibility with their spouses to nominal responsibility in which the woman inherited the office from a relative, the duties of which were performed thenceforth by her husband.

The most prominent of these three figures was Micaela Bastidas. At times, she appears to have directed rebel operations and to have had a better sense of military priorities than her husband, whose undoubted charisma was not always matched by a clear strategic vision or a recognition of the need to take urgent action to forestall looming military and logistical crises. Bastidas, on the contrary, combined strategic clarity with a heightened sense of urgency. Her demonstrated ability as a military planner and staff officer was superior to that of her husband. Moreover, Bastidas was reputed to have been fiercer than her husband, issuing threats to the fainthearted and ordering reprisals against deserters, peninsular Spaniards (chapetones), and even creoles (españoles), although she herself had been registered as a Creole (española) at her baptism. It was alleged that her orders and threats led to the death of many chapetones and Creoles in the provinces. She employed a mixture of menace and persuasion in forging and maintaining alliances and allegiances, oversaw prisoners and their interrogation, and directed recruiting efforts once the rebellion had commenced. She also made rebel loyalists and her “favorites” officeholders (caciques, alcaldes) in many highland villages. Bastidas received aid from her kinswomen, among whom Cecilia Túpac Amaru and Marcela Castro are the best known. She ruled with an iron hand at the rebel headquarters in Tungasuca while her husband was on expeditions. She sent written orders to the provinces, organized logistics, and even reprimanded her spouse over his lack of urgency and inability to understand the ebb and flow of the fortunes of war. Bastidas combined decisiveness in command with a clear appreciation of strategic and tactical considerations; her grasp of details was as assured as her astute appreciation of the strategic imperatives.

Bartolina Sisa did not exercise control over rebel partisans to nearly such a degree as did Bastidas, but she did accompany her husband and his army in battle. Indeed, her husband similarly lacked the stature of Túpac Amaru, such that Catari needed to shore up his own uncertain authority by invoking Amaru’s name. Nevertheless, Bartolina Sisa remained at the center of operations in upper Peru. In particular, she helped form, organize, and direct the catarista army. Gregoria Apasa, however, surpassed Sisa’s achievements and leadership status, and her role from mid-1781 was more akin to that of Bastidas in the northern movement. By that time, José Gabriel had been captured and executed, and his nephew Andrés (Mendigure) Túpac Amaru had taken effective control of the greater insurgency. His personal liaison with Túpac Catari’s sister facilitated the union of the two movements. Their relationship was part political, part personal, and it is impossible to ascertain precisely the extent to which Andrés and Gregoria shared power. Clearly, however, she played a major role in the combined operations of the joint insurgency. In a notorious incident, when rebel forces took the town of Sorata, she and Andrés jointly sat in judgment of the captives, many of whom were summarily executed.

Gregoria Apasa became popularly known as queen (reina) of the southern insurgency. Micaela Bastidas was deferred to variously as la cacica, señora gobernadora, or simply “wife of the rebel.” There was, however, tacit recognition of her de facto regal status: Túpac Catari called himself viceroy and his wife vicereine, thereby acknowledging the sovereignty of José Gabriel Túpac Amaru; Micaela was thus implicitly regarded as queen, in contrast to Bartolina’s vicereine. Titles were important within indigenous society; rank lent elite authority. This held true for both women and men. Micaela derived her authority from José Gabriel’s status as Inca. There were, however, other women who collaborated closely during the rebellion whose elite status sprang from their high birth or innate talents. The cacica of the towns of Acos and Acomayo, Tomasa Tito Condemaita, led the Indians within her chiefdom to the field of battle. The cacica of Combapata, Catalina Salas Pachacuti, was of noble Incan lineage; her husband was Ramón Moscoso, who derived his local authority from her inherited office and who was the cousin of the powerful bishop of Cuzco. Therefore, Doña Catalina enjoyed an elite status in both town and country. We know less about a third rebel cacica, Francisca Herrera, who nevertheless is perhaps the most interesting of these three: she is also described as a beata, or holy woman. This intriguing aside hints at a religious wellspring of female political authority in rural areas.

There is similar testimony in two later movements: in Lircay (Huancavelica) in 1811 and in Ocongate in the Cuzco region in 1814–1815. During the former, which was a localized messianic revolt, the charismatic authority of the leader was said to derive from his mother, an alleged sorceress (bruja); in the latter case, a major indigenous insurgency within the 1814 so-called revolution of the fatherland, the wife of the principal insurgent was also said to be a bruja. In any event, religious praxis and political authority were probably indivisible within native Andean society, and political authority in the colonial Andes encompassed the principle that a woman or a man might hold political office, either separately or jointly.

It was therefore right and proper that female leaders such as Bastidas, Sisa, Apasa, and Tito Condemaita should be tried for treason and related crimes; they could hardly expect a plea of mitigation, based on compulsion from their spouses, to succeed. It followed ineluctably that they would be found guilty, and the penalty for treason was death. Because of their culpability, many women died, because the death penalty was judged appropriate to their crimes. What was not consonant with due legal process, however, was the horrific manner of their execution. A few details will suffice: Bastidas’s tongue was cut out, and she was then garroted. Because of the slenderness of her neck, this method was unsuccessful, and the two official executioners tied ropes around her neck, which each pulled, all the while punching her stomach and breasts until she died. Apasa was paraded with a crown made of nails, and Sisa was ritually humiliated in a similar manner. The corpses of all three were decapitated and dismembered, with their heads, arms, and hands placed on pikes at select villages throughout the southern highlands. If under prevailing legal norms they deserved death, the manner of their execution was unwarranted— and is resented to the present day by Peruvians and Bolivians. Today these women are venerated as martyrs and heroines in the struggle for freedom from Spanish tyranny.

References and Further Reading

Campbell, Leon. “Women and the Great Rebellion in Peru, 1780–1783,” The Americas 42, no. 2 (1985):163–196.

Martín, Luis. 1983. Daughters of the Conquistadores: Women of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press.

Silverblatt, Irene. 1987. Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial

Peru. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Socolow, Susan Migden. 2000. The Women of Colonial Latin America. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Stavig, Ward. 1999. The World of Túpac Amaru: Conflict, Community, and Identity in Colonial

Peru. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Thomson, Sinclair. 2002. We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency. Madison: University of Wisconsin.

H-Diplo Article Review No. 241: “Images of the Adversary: NATO Assessments of the Soviet Union, 1953-1964.”

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No. 241

Published on 16 September 2009

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Evanthis Hatzivassiliou.  “Images of the Adversary:  NATO Assessments of the Soviet Union, 1953-1964.”  Journal of Cold War Studies 11:2 (Spring 2009):  89-116.

Review by Linda Risso, University of Reading

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The multilateral defence structure of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and its role as a forum for the projection of national defence and information policies make it an intricate research subject.  The NATO Archives in Brussels provide crucial information on both the military and political dimensions of the alliance.  In addition to its integrated military command and the co-ordination of rearmament and the defence policies of its members, NATO carried out an important action in the production and dissemination to its members of information about the Soviet Union and its satellites for defensive purposes.  In order to study specific aspects of the ‘Soviet question’, throughout the Cold War, NATO set up numerous working groups and committees, often on an ad hoc basis and for a limited period of time.  Topics ranged from the monitoring of the communist front organisations to the analysis of the infiltration of communism in newly independent African countries, from the study of the economic development of the Soviet bloc to the assessment of the Sino-Soviet partnership.

Evanthis Hatzivassiliou examines NATO’s first assessments of the Soviet military and economic potential.  His research is based on the North Atlantic Council’s papers held at the NATO Archives in Brussels.

Despite the fact that these documents have been declassified for almost a decade, they remained largely under-studied and this article is therefore an important contribution to our understanding of NATO’s own assessment of the Soviet military threat.  Hatzivassiliou carries out a detailed summary of the reports produced between 1953 and 1964 by the NATO experts.  The Working Group on Trends of Soviet Policy (later Trends and Implications of Soviet Policy), for example, operated between

1953 and 1955 and its reports showed the continuity of the Soviet regime after Stalin’s death.  In the same period, the Working Group on Economic Trends carried out a comparison of the Western and Eastern economies and a projection of the balance of economic power over the following decades.  The reports revealed that although the declared Soviet goal of economically overtaking the Western bloc would not be achieved, the gap between the two blocs would be substantially reduced.  At the end of the Fifties, the reports produced by the Committee of Economic Advisers revealed an important shift in the economic relations within the Eastern

bloc:  after 1956, the USSR stopped the economic exploitation of the satellites states and started extending aid to them and imposing a division of labour among the satellites, with each country specialising in one specific aspect of industrial and weapon production.  Equally important were the conclusions reached by the Atlantic Policy Advisory Group (APAG), which was established in 1962 to gain a more sophisticated insight into the Sino-Soviet alliance.

The information gathered by the working groups and committees allowed the NATO Council to have a more sophisticated understanding of the Soviet military and economic potential, to monitor the USSR’s relations with the satellites and to project future developments of the Soviet security strategy.  The NATO experts could therefore achieve a more sophisticated understanding of the Soviet aims and establish that they were not merely strategic. The need to maintain the ‘conquests of socialism’ had also to be taken into account when evaluating the Soviet strategic goals in the region.

Hatzivassiliou tells us that the reports were discussed by the NATO Council, but he does not examine to what degree the discussions that generated from these reports brought a review of NATO’s strategic concept and information policies.  For example, the article mentions that in 1960 NATO experts correctly attributed the Soviet troop reductions announced in 1960 by Moscow to the changed economic and demographic circumstance within the Soviet Union. According to Hatzivassiliou, this is evidence that NATO’s study of the economic trends made it easier for their analysts to understand shifts in the Soviet strategy (p. 111). The extent to which the reports summarised in this article influenced NATO’s defensive strategy remains, however, an open question.

This article also raises the question of the relationship between the perception of the adversary and accuracy of the analysis carried out by NATO.  According to Hatzivassiliou, despite the NATO reports having some misinterpretations and errors, in the majority of cases they were relatively accurate and detailed.  Precisely because of their accuracy, it is crucial to know how these reports were put together and what sources they were based on.  The reports produced by NATO’s International Staff were for the most part based on information provided by national delegations, which sent regular reports.  Not all delegations contributed to the same degree and, as Hatzivassiliou points out, the Americans contributed large amount of material which often came directly from the CIA (p. 113).  Yet, the role of other delegations, and particularly of the British, should not be overlooked.  Papers from the NATO Archives and from National Archives in London reveal that the Information Research Department made consistent use of the British Delegation and of the British experts in NATO to spread their intelligence and information material, a point already put forward by Andrew Defty1.  The NATO archives also show that from the end of the Fifties, the Dutch, West Germans and French became equally active in providing intelligence and propaganda information and recent scholarship has challenged the view whereby the US Delegation played an uncontested leading role in shaping NATO’s information action.2  More research of the NATO archival material is therefore needed to assess the shifting degrees of initiative of the national delegations and their impact on the formulation NATO’s security, military and information policies.

Linda Risso is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Reading. She is currently writing a monograph on the NATO Information Service during the Cold War.

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Notes

1 Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda, 1945-1953 (London: Routledge, 2004).

2 Valerie Aubourg, “Creating the texture of the Atlantic Community: The NATO Information Service, private Atlantic Networks and the Atlantic Community in the 1950s,”in Val?rie Aubourg , G?rard Bossuat and Giles Scott-Smith (eds.), European Community, Atlantic Community (Paris: Soleb, 2008), pp. 390-415;  Linda Risso, “‘Enlightening Public Opinion’:

A Study of NATO’s Information Policies between 1949 and 1959 based on Recently Declassified Documents,” Cold War History: 7/1 (February 2007), pp. 45-74.

H-Diplo Review Essay: Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914

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Published on 17 September 2009

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Martin Thomas.  Empires of Intelligence:  Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914.  Berkeley:  University of California Press, 2008. xii + 428pp.  Maps, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.  $49.95 (cloth).  ISBN 978-0-520-25117-5.

Reviewed for H-Diplo by Peter John Brobst, Ohio University

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Nearly ten years ago, Malcolm Yapp called for a new look at the “Great Game” of empire in Asia and the Middle East.  The distinguished historian of the subject remarked on “how few books are written about what one may call imperial plumbing.” And yet, he noted, “there were more policemen than soldiers in British India and it was on the policemen that the Raj ultimately rested.”  Scholars had “somehow neglected the key element in how empires run, namely the police.”  Yapp proposed “some alternative images:  not of Kim but the policeman, Strickland, who features in Kim and in several short stories by Kipling.”  Strickland represented “the true master of what Kipling understood to be the great game,” while Ronald Merrick, the menacing policeman in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, seemed the “archetypal figure” of the British Raj.1

Today there is wide and understandable interest in Professor Yapp’s suggested agenda.  The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the attendant issues of counter-insurgency and terrorism, have no doubt stimulated much of it, just as the Cold War conditioned the earlier emphasis on balancing the big battalions.  Whatever the reasons, we now enjoy a sophisticated and growing body of scholarship on policing-by which is meant political policing as opposed to criminal investigation.  Many studies deal with the workaday operation of intelligence and state security in the colonial world, but few of them treat this machinery of modern government as in itself a source of empire.

Martin Thomas’s informative new book demonstrates that in the Middle Eastern empires developed by Britain and France between the two world wars, the security services were indeed foundational.  Empires of Intelligence reflects a broad yet thorough reading in both imperial and intelligence studies.  The book provides a masterful synthesis of historiography with extensive archival research.  It builds conceptually on C. A. Bayly’s work on empire and information in nineteenth century India, and nicely complements Priya Satia’s concurrently published study of Britain’s “covert empire” in the Middle East.2  It is the comparative approach that Thomas brings to his subject that sets him apart.  Equally sure-footed on either side, he finds British and French imperialism comparable in the outlook and dilemmas of secret service if not in the particulars of its organization.

Thomas argues that the colonial states which Britain and France imposed on the interwar Arab world were in essence “intelligence states.”  These structures of governance attempted to substitute covert, specialist bureaucracies for the straightforward application of military power that characterized the imperialism of the nineteenth century.  The expert management and savvy manipulation of information promised to secure what once had required a comparatively large army.  A scalpel for a bludgeon, the intelligence state was an apparatus peculiarly attuned to the political, financial, and moral tenor of liberal democracy in the 1920s and 30s.  In these decades the language of trusteeship and mandates replaced unapologetic talk of “empire,” although the effect “revalorized the transformational impulse” behind British and French imperialism (70).  In short, the intelligence state represented a “compensatory strategy” (298) to maintain empire on the cheap.

As it turned out, however, the attractions of the colonial intelligence state proved more theoretical than practical.  Thomas devotes much if not most of his scrutiny to the limitations of the British and French security services as empire-builders.  The most basic shortcoming lay in the existential biases of Anglo-French officials and agents, particularly their constant insistence that organized nationalism had to spring from external versus regional sources.  It nearly goes without saying that such bias reflected the cultural prejudice and predilections, the racism and romanticism, of the era.  Thomas acknowledges the relevance of post-colonial criticism to his subject, and offers a cogent commentary on the stultifying effect that the “Orientalist gaze” had on the intelligence state.  But he also emphasizes the influence of institutional memory, of lessons learned from professional practice before and during World War I, and of indications from the sources and methods, however imperfect, that were actually available to British and French authorities.

The colonial intelligence state was captive not only to the biases of its personnel but to technology and geography as well.  In fact, much of the trouble encountered by the British and French security services in the interwar Middle East stemmed from what in today’s defense parlance might be described as an asymmetrical battlefield.  Technical collection, particularly signals interception, dominated the intelligence contest among the great powers.  But while signals could turn up evidence of, say, Kemalist or Soviet intrigue, and thus focus the attention of policymakers on external dangers, they yielded little insight into the politics and social dynamics of the mosque, the souk, or the so-called Arab street.  If open sources of intelligence, such as newspapers and pamphlets, offered some compensation in the cities, the security services found no mitigation of the problem in the remote deserts and mountains-from Waziristan to the Rif-that their political masters sought to control too.

As a result of the asymmetrical environment in the Middle East, human intelligence held primacy in the regional “information order” of the British and French empires.  Each depended on networks of informants developed, managed, and interpreted by specialist officers with basic mastery of Arabic and other regional languages but a widely variable command of the vernacular. Even Britain’s newfangled Royal Air Force, which promised to deliver unprecedented efficiency in colonial policing through surveillance and enforcement from the sky, relied on ground-based Special Service Officers (SSOs) for warning and targeting.

The HUMINT effort was extensive and impressive, but it offered no panacea for the Anglo-French intelligence states in the Middle East.

The volume of information proved much less a problem than the sifting of the good from the bad.  Thomas’s findings will surprise no one familiar with the recent “Curveball” scandal over intelligence in the Iraq War.

The recruitment of informants often proved arbitrary, idiosyncratic, and unreliable-an SSO’s manservant here, a gossipy secretariat clerk there, and so on.  In the final analysis the colonial intelligence state involved a system of collaboration and clientage in which who was gaming whom was not always so clear.  In this respect, this new model imperialism was perhaps not so different from that of the nineteenth century.  At least it was not as powerful as its advocates and critics alike imagined.

In fact, Thomas opens with the point that intelligence, in John Ferris’s phrase, “is not a form of power but a means to guide its use” (p. 2), and reiterates it throughout the book.  To be sure, the British and French security services cultivated and leveraged expertise to gain advantage and privilege their own agenda in a classic model of intra-governmental politics.  But the tables could be turned and intelligence readily politicized, particularly when civil administrators or regular soldiers felt confident in their own knowledge and experience.  Thomas’s account of the manipulation of intelligence on the Kurds by colonial officials in Iraq provides a case in point.  At its best intelligence is a “multiplier,” a lens to clarify options and focus action.  In the Kurdish instance, as unfortunately in so many others, it became a stalking horse.  As Thomas’s study underscores, the collection and analysis of intelligence is concomitant with, but not identical to, the formulation of policy.

Given his meticulous dissection and nuanced anatomy of the colonial intelligence state in the Middle East, it is disappointing that Thomas makes little mention of the oil industry’s role in its development and operation.  Oil was not a primary interest in French North Africa during the interwar years, but it was certainly a driving force behind French policy in the Fertile Crescent.  In Britain, the Oil Board of the Cabinet’s Committee of Imperial Defense was a clearinghouse for the assessment of Middle Eastern intelligence.  Whitehall collected and evaluated much of the topographical and environmental intelligence that figures prominently in Thomas’s book on the basis of oil interests-whether strategic or commercial.  And then there is the question of the revolving door between government and business.  For instance, Stephen Longrigg, who makes a brief appearance in Empires of Intelligence as a junior political officer in Iraq after World War I, went on to become a senior director of Britain’s Iraq Petroleum Company in the 1930s.  He subsequently returned to military duty during World War II, and served as the distinctly intelligence-minded governor in Eritrea after Britain captured that country from Italy.

This criticism is really meant only to suggest avenues for future research into the colonial intelligence state that Thomas has so effectively delineated.  The same can be said of the fact that the book’s title does not make explicit the Middle Eastern focus of the study.  To what extent did this model of governance apply in other areas of the British and French empires, and for that matter in other empires of the twentieth century?  All in all, Thomas has produced an acute and much needed work of historical analysis that should interest intelligence practitioners as well as academics.  Empires of Intelligence may not easily suit undergraduates or the casual reader, but it is invaluable reading for any specialist in imperial, intelligence, or contemporary international history.

Peter John Brobst is Associate Professor of History at Ohio University, where he teaches imperial and international history.  He is the author of The Future of the Great Game:  Sir Olaf Caroe, India’s Independence, and the Defense of Asia (University of Akron Press, 2005), and is currently writing a book about strategy and globalism in the Indian Ocean between 1962 and 1977.

Copyright (c) 2009 H-Net:  Humanities and Social Sciences Online.

H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for non-profit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author(s), web location, date of publication, H-Diplo, and H-Net:

Humanities & Social Sciences Online.  For other uses, contact the H-Diplo editorial staff at h-diplo@h-net.msu.edu.

Notes

1 Malcolm Yapp, “The Legend of the Great Game,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 111, 2001, pp. 197-198.

2 C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information:  Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Priya Satia, Spies in Arabia:  The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2008).

Battle of Saint Gotthard (1664)

St Gotthard was the major battle in the Austro-Turkish war of 1663-64. In 1661, Habsburg forces under the Italian Raimondo Montecuccoli had intervened in Transylvania to assist a rebellion against the Turks. This was unsuccessful and provoked Turkish attacks on Austria. Montecuccoli repelled the 1663 attack and checked the invasion in 1664 at St Gotthard.

THE WAR OF 1663-64

War resumed in 1663 as a result of Habsburg efforts to challenge Ottoman dominance of Transylvania. The Grand Vizier, Fazil Ahmet, advanced in 1664, being met near St Gotthard by the Austrians under Montecuccoli, who sought to block any Ottoman advance on Graz or Vienna. The Austrians were supported by German contingents and by French troops sent by Louis XIV. The Ottoman forces, prevented from advancing across the river Raab, lost their cannon, but avoided a rout. The war was terminated swiftly by the Peace of Vasvar (1664), with an Austrian agreement to respect the Ottoman position in Transylvania.

Ahmed Fazil Köprülü (1635–1676).

Grand vezier at 26, in direct succession following his father Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, holding office from 1661–1676. He was as ruthless as his father but far more debauched. Like his father, he began his term by exterminating in a bloody purge all political opposition he could identify, including some courtiers who had supported his father and his own succession. Köprülü Ahmed Fazil also continued his father’s policy of full-bore aggression into Hungary and other Habsburg lands. His offensive into Hungary was stopped by Montecuccoli at St. Gotthard (August 1, 1664), but nevertheless resulted in a treaty favorable to the Ottomans, the Peace of Vasvár, signed nine days later. Unlike his father, Köprülü Ahmed Fazil successfully completed the Ottoman-Venetian War (1645–1669), traveling personally to Crete to conduct the final phase of the siege of Candia (1666–1669). He then opened a new front and war against Poland, the Ottoman-Polish War (1672–1676). His ambitions were repeatedly frustrated by the superior generalship of Jan Sobieski: he lost badly at Chocim in November 1673, and again at Lwów (Lvov) in 1675, despite having superior numbers in each case. He died at the start of the 1676 campaign, and his plans and army were defeated yet again later in the year at Zuravno.

Raimondo Montecuccoli, (1609–1680).

Habsburg field marshal. An Italian, he entered Austrian and Imperial service in 1625. He saw extensive action during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), including at the Battles of Lutzen (1634), First Nördlingen (1634), and Wittstock (1636). He was captured by the Swedes at Wittstock and held for 30 months before being ransomed back to the emperor. He used the time to study all available literature on the “art of war,” ancient and contemporary. After his release he fought in Silesia and Lombardy. He fought against the Swedes in the last several years of the German war, notably at Zusmarshausen (1648). He fought Sweden again during the Second Northern War (1655–1660), alongside the “Great Elector” of Brandenburg, Friedrich-Wilhelm. Montecuccoli led Austrian armies against the Ottomans in the 1660s. He won at St. Gotthard (August 1, 1664), though more by Ottoman misfortune than any special skill on his part. Regardless, the victory brought him appointment as head of the Hofkriegsrat. He fought well against the French during the Dutch War (1672–1678). Feeling his age, he retired to write extensively on the subject of war and gained much influence thereby, deserved or not.

Like many minds of the age, Montecuccoli sought perfect order even in the sheer chaos of combat, believing that there were immutable “laws of war” that might be discovered and codified. This approach to war was much approved by the salon set and in studies of the good professors of the Sorbonne and The Hague, but it bore no relation to actual warfare then or since. For instance, Montecuccoli proposed a law of war that established a perfectly-sized Imperial army of 28,000 foot and 22,000 horse to face any opposing Ottoman force, of whatever size or makeup. He was more right in famously declaring that the precondition of successful war making was having enough money. As for the problem of finding soldiers to feed into the Imperial war machine he was busy crafting in theory, Montecuccoli wrote that all “orphans, bastards, beggars, and paupers” cared for by charitable orders or in hospices should be swept into the Army. This was far from the later concept of the “nation in arms” or the ancient one of a natural nobility of warriors.

Montecuccoli came out of retirement to fence with Turenne in a prolonged war of maneuver in Germany during the campaign of 1673. He joined the future William III to besiege Bonn that November. Montecuccoli lost a campaign of maneuver to Turenne during the summer of 1675. By July he was short on food and fodder, and in full retreat. Turenne tried to force battle at Sasbach on July 27, but before the fight got underway, he was killed by an Imperial cannonball. Montecuccoli retired for the final time a few months later, the same year as the Great Condé. Widely regarded and hailed by earlier historians as a brilliantly skillful practitioner of the art of 17th-century positional warfare, his reputation may exceed what is deserved. It has been downgraded in more recent studies of his campaigns and especially of his writings on war.

Battle of St. Gotthard, (August 1, 1664).

A Habsburg army reinforced by French troops and Rhinelanders to a total of about 40,000 men fought to victory over the Ottomans and their Tatar allies at St. Gotthard, a small village in Hungary near the Styrian border. The Habsburgs were led by Montecuccoli, who commanded about one-quarter of the Allied troops. Before the Allies arrived, the Ottomans had thrown a rickety bridge over the Raba river, gaining a foothold on the far side. The bridge collapsed, however, forcing the Ottomans to abandon the bridgehead. Tatars helped extricate infantry from forward positions, mounting foot soldiers on the extra horses that always accompanied Tatar fighters into battle. Failure of the bridge was compounded by tactical errors that decided the outcome of the fight, rather than by any supposed or later-reported brilliance on the part of Montecuccoli, as was once widely thought among military historians. A young Charles V also saw action at St. Gotthard, leading a cavalry charge against the Ottoman left. The result contributed to negotiation of the Peace of Vasvár (August 10, 1664), which turned into a 20-year Habsburg-Ottoman truce. This conclusion was secured only in part by military action; Leopold I also bought peace by paying a tribute to the sultan of 200,000 florins.

Mecklenburg Uniforms in Turkish War 1663-64

The Turkish War of 1663-64 for which a Mecklenburg’s Military triplum was agreed and to leave in March 1664. In actual fact Mecklenburg only contributed 100 horse under Lt. Col. von Schack and 200 foot under Captain von Bibow. The infantry was a company of the regiment under Col. Rudolf von Ende from Magdeburg, the 3rd regiment of foot. One third of the foot carried pikes, the rest muskets.

The companies marched to the rendezvous at Großen-Salza were attached to their regiments and marched to Vienna by way of Thüringen, Vogtland, Bohemia and lower Austria crossing the Danube at Vienna on 16th June. After being mustered by the Margrave of Baden they went on to Hungary where they fought in the battle of St. Gotthard on 1st August 1664, being among the first to attack and loosing their colonel in the battle. The squadrons of von Schack lost 3 officers and 8 troopers dead, 2 NCOs and 39 troopers missing, of these 4 Mecklenburgers. The regiment von Ende had lost not only the colonel but was almost destroyed. Only two officers were left, Captain Wiesener and the Mecklenburger Captain von Bibow who took over command of the rest. His company had lost 2 officers, 3 NCOs and 68 men dead or missing. By the end of September the horse had only 25 men primaplana and 66 troopers, the foot only 2 officers and 74 NCOs and other ranks. After the peace of Vasvar they were sent home on 13th October, the infantry reaching Mecklenburg on 12th, the cavalry on 15th December.

DANISH-SWEDISH WAR

The Battle of Oland (30-31 May 1564) was an important episode in the bitter Swedish-Danish struggle of 1563-70. The Swedes lost their new flagship, the Mars, after repeated attacks by the Danish ships and their Lubeck allies under Herlof Trolle. The Mars was successfully boarded on the second day of the battle, caught fire, and blew up. Both fleets then withdrew for repairs.

In the Baltic in the Sixteenth Century, there was conflict between Denmark and Sweden, including a long period of war from 1501 to 1520 when the Oldenburg kings, who ruled in Denmark and Norway, tried to gain control over Sweden. In 1517, Christian II started a series of intensified attempts to gain control over Sweden. In 1524, the Danes recognized Gustavus Vasa as King of Sweden. Gustavus joined Frederick I of Denmark in defeating Lubeck and resisting an attempt by Christian II to regain the Danish throne (1534-36), but in 1563 the two powers went to war. Sweden’s sole outlet to the North Sea, Alvsborg (Gothenburg), fell to the Danes in 1563, prompting Erik XIV of Sweden to seek a new route through southern Norway. Trondheim fell to the Swedes in 1564, much of southern Norway was overrun in 1567 and Oslo was taken, but the Swedes were held at Akershus. From 1565 until 1569 the Swedes held Varberg, to the south of Alvsborg.

Erik relied on native troops, which he transformed by training them in the combined use of pikes and firearms in linear formations. He made the pike the basis of offensive infantry tactics. Frederick II of Denmark used German mercenaries who were usually more successful, severely defeating the Swedes at Axtorna: Erik’s troops fought well there but were poorly commanded. The Danish army managed to advance as far as Norrkoping in late 1567 before being forced to retreat by the weather.

At sea, 1563-70 saw the first modem naval war between sailing battle fleets in European waters, as Denmark and Sweden fought for control of the invasion routes. The Danes were supported by the semi-independent German city of Lubeck – no longer the great sea power it had been but still able to make an important contribution. Both sides sought to destroy the opposing fleet, and seven battles were fought between 1563 and 1566. The Swedes, under Klas Kristersson Hom, with their modem bronze artillery, systematically used stand-off gunfire to block Danish boarding tactics: sheer weight of metal was decisive. Both navies expanded greatly, and in the late 1560s the Swedes may have had the largest sailing fleet of the period. Both sides were exhausted by 1568, and peace was agreed without any territorial gains to either side.

Warfare on land in the Baltic involved relatively few battles. Sieges were more important, while devastation was used to reduce opponents’ fighting capability. This conflict is far more than a footnote to the history of European warfare, being an important reminder of the growing prominence of Sweden and Russia. The tactics employed were less formalistic than those developed in western Europe, and the troops sometimes less specialized in weaponry, but their warfare was well-suited to the eastern European military circumstances of great distances and small populations.

BATTLE OF MOHACS 29 AUGUST 1526

Twice in the sixteenth century, foolish military initiatives by young monarchs led to the end of their lives and of the independence of important states. Sebastian of Portugal was crushed by the Moroccans at Alcazarquivir in 1578. In 1526, Louis II of Hungary confronted the powerful forces of Suleiman the Magnificent. Although Suleiman had set off in April 1526, bad weather delayed his crossing of the river Drava until late August. The Hungarians, however, in part due to slow preparations, were divided, poorly led and short of infantry, and they failed either to contest the Drava crossing or to retire to Buda and allow the Ottomans to exhaust their resources in a difficult siege. Instead they deployed behind the Borza, a small tributary of the Danube, and rather than waiting on the defensive, their heavy cavalry advanced.

The Hungarian charge (1) pushed back the Ottoman sipahis (cavalry) of Rumelia, but halted when Turkish troops advanced on their flank. Louis then led the remainder of his cavalry in a second attack which drove through the sipahis of Anatolia, but was stopped by the janissaries and cannon. Their fITe caused havoc, and the Hungarians, their dynamism spent, were then attacked in front and rear by the more numerous Turkish forces. Louis and most of his aristocracy died on the battlefield or in the nearby Danube marshes, Louis drowning while trying to swim across a river in armour, and few of his army escaped (3). Suleiman swept on to Buda, which fell ten days later. The days of independent Hungary were numbered. Louis had no children, and his inheritance was to be contested by his brother-in-law Archduke Ferdinand and by the Ottomans. Suleiman, however, initially decided not to annex Hungary but rather to accept the suggestion by John Zapolya, Prince of Transylvania, who was opposed to the Habsburgs, that he and his supporters be left in control in return for an acknowledgement of Ottoman suzerainty and a payment of tribute. Zapolya was chosen King of Hungary at the Tokay diet in 1527, but the Habsburgs under Ferdinand defeated him in 1527, leading to renewed Ottoman intervention in 1528-29.

Ernst Brandenburg

By the Spring of 1917 the Western Front had been stalemated for more than two years with the armies of Germany and the Allies deadlocked in static trench warfare. At sea, the fleets of both Germany and Great Britain were also at a strategic impasse following the inconclusive Battle of Jutland in 1916. The unrestricted U-Boat campaign in the Atlantic had resulted in Americas entry into the War, and Germany turned to its fledgling air force to help break the deadlock. Night raids by Zeppelins in 1915 and 1916 had proven ineffectual as the great airships had proven vulnerable to the unpredictable weather and to increasingly effective defenses. A new strategic weapon would therefore be utilized – the heavy bomber. With a fleet of such airplanes, the very heart of London could be attacked.

In March of 1917 a new unit was formed in Flanders, soon to be known as the England Geschwader. Lead by Hauptman Ernst Brandenburg, Kaghol 3 (the units official designation,) was equipped with the Gotha G. IV. With a crew of three, and a wingspan of nearly seventy-eight feet, the G. IV was an impressive flying machine. Powered by twin 260-HP Mercedes six cylinder, in-line, water-cooled engines, the Gotha had a top speed of 88-MPH. Its service ceiling was more than 21,000 feet, and its range was 305 miles. The maximum bomb load was 1,100 pounds, but on the first daylight raid on London, each aircraft would carry six 110-lb bombs. For defensive purposes the Gothas were armed with two 7.92mm machine guns. An interesting feature of the G. IV was the ability of the rear gunner to fire not only rearwards and upwards, but could also fire downwards through a specially designed tunnel in the fuselage.

On June 13, 1917 Brandenburg led his unit in his red-tailed Gotha on the first daylight bombing raid to London. Twenty G. IVs departed on this historic mission, but two soon turned back, and another four bombed other targets due to mechanical problems. A total of 128 bombs were dropped on the mission with devastating effects. All told, 162 people were killed in the raid, and another 432 were injured. It was a portent of the future of aerial warfare. Although 94 defensive sorties were flown against the raiders, only a few British fighters made contact with the Gothas before they reached their targets. One fighter which did intercept was a Bristol F2B piloted by Capt. C. W. E. Cole-Hamilton of No. 35 Training Squadron. The observer, Capt. C. H. Keevil was killed during the battle.

On the next day, June 14, it was announced that Brandenburg had been awarded the Pour Le Mérite. No general citation this time, it specifically mentioned the attack on London of his 17 aircraft. He was ordered to the Kaiser’s headquarters in Ban Kreuznach to give a personal report and be invested with the order by the Emperor himself. Then an ironic tragedy occurred. In taking off on June 19 to return to his squadron, the two-seater crashed killing his pilot, Oberleutnant Hans-Ulrich von Trotha, and so severely injuring him that he lost a leg. The command of Kagohl 3 was turned over to Hauptmann Rudolf Kleine

By then the first battle of Britain was well underway.

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The Evolution of French Napoleonic Army Organization

One of the most significant developments in command and control during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars was the introduction of the combat division and army corps. The increasing size of armies during the eighteenth century as well as multiple theatres of war required administrative reorganization of European armies. Generally, the standard military unit was the infantry regiment, composed of one or two combat battalions and a depot battalion. Cavalry regiments also remained the standard, although their squadrons could be divided among armies in different theatres.

The army commander therefore contended with controlling numerous battalions and squadrons on the strategic, operational and tactical level. This created an enormous burden for army staffs, who had the responsibility for keeping track of the units within an army, keeping them supplied and ensuring that orders were properly disseminated in a timely fashion. This was no easy task. The coordination of tens of thousands of men on campaign often led to confusion and inefficiency. To reduce the difficulty, European armies were often organized into ad hoc wings, columns (Abteilungen) , divisions and brigades whose composition depended entirely on the mission at hand. There was no standardization of army organization above the regiment.

In 1759, during the Seven Years War, the Duc de Broglie (1718-1804) established combat divisions within French Army, but these were temporary formations. Also during the mid-eighteenth century, the French army introduced the administrative military division. France was divided into military regions and each general of a division was responsible for the regiments garrisoned within his region. This organization, however, did not translate into the standing combat division that emerged during the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), but it provided the foundation for that development.

Pierre de Bourcet (1700-80), a staff officer, advocated the introduction of the division as a standard formation in his Principes de la Guerre des Montagnes, written in the 1760s-1770s. Divisions would enable an army to advance along parallel routes and unite rapidly for battle. The formation would facilitate greater efficiency on campaign and provide for the rapid movement of larger numbers of troops over great distances, as opposed to an army using a single road, moving slowly and encumbered by supply trains. To that end, another French military theorist, the Comte de Guibert (1743-90), argued in his Essai general de tactique of the early 1770s that armies should dispense with their supply trains in order to increase their flexibility and mobility.

‘March Divided, Fight United’

The division began to develop in the mid-eighteenth century as a means of improving an army’s strategic mobility and its ease of command. A general commanding an army did not have to keep track of each battalion and squadron but merely of his divisions. Meanwhile, the divisional generals were responsible for controlling their respective regiments. Indeed, while the French explored divisional organization they also introduced the infantry brigade – a unit formed of two infantry regiments. Prussia, too, organized its army into brigades but did not adopt the combat division. What made the French division unique was the integration of artillery and cavalry into the table of organization. Typically, artillery and cavalry were under the direct control of the army commander, who apportioned it to his subordinates as needed. By integrating artillery and cavalry into the divisional structure, the French possessed greater firepower and reconnaissance at a lower level. Divisions could march divided, engage the enemy and have adequate support for a short period until reinforced by other divisions. The principle is often cited as ‘march divided, fight united’.

During the French Revolutionary Wars, the increased size of campaign armies compelled the Revolutionaries to introduce the combat division as a permanent entity within army organization. Each division comprised two infantry brigades, a cavalry detachment – a squadron or regiment and an artillery battery. At times, generals gave command of multiple divisions to a single subordinate, dependent upon the plan of operations. General Andre Massena (1758-1817), for example, led two divisions of Napoleon’s Army of Italy in 1796; General Kleber also led two divisions in Belgium in 1794.

Napoleon built upon the divisional foundation to expand the organizational system, introducing the corps d’armée. These bodies existed during the revolution but in a temporary state. Each corps comprised two or three infantry divisions, a cavalry brigade (later division), divisional artillery and a corps artillery reserve. Engineer companies and a corps staff were included to make the organization a self-contained fighting unit of 20,000-30,000 men.

A marshal of France, and occasionally a general of division (general de division), commanded a French corps after 1804. Each divisional commander, his brigadiers and the regiments comprising the corps remained part of the corps from campaign to campaign. A French corps also, like a Roman Legion, generally remained in a specific European theatre. Thus Marshal Louis Davout’s vaunted III Corps of the Grande Armée retained its composition from its establishment in 1803 through to 1812 and was based in Germany.

Ideally, French corps operated on independent axes of advance but within mutual support of another. This allowed Napoleon to coordinate the Grande Armée on campaign with greater ease than his opponents could control their armies; the latter rejected the corps system, preferring the traditional column, or Abteilung. During the 1806 campaign against Prussia, Napoleon deployed his army into essentially three columns of three corps, the bataillon carré. Each corps was a half-day march from the supporting corps and a full day from all corps in any direction.

Prussia and Austria adopted the divisional system by the early nineteenth century, but their divisions remained largely administrative, and no standing combat divisions came into being until 1809 and thereafter. The Russians did develop military divisions and combat divisions by 1805, but they were incredibly cumbersome and lacked the appropriate staff to manage the brigades and regiments adequately. In Britain, brigade and divisional organization were ad hoc, with formations established for specific expeditions.

Stukas Strike at the Beginning of Barbarossa

And there was another battlefront where the same sorry saga of the Stuka was, it seemed, about to be played out for yet a third time – the initial spectacular successes, followed by the inexorable growth of enemy air opposition, and then the inevitable relegation to night operations. But in Russia things were to prove different. Armed with a pair of 37 mm cannon underwing, the Ju 87 enjoyed a new lease of life as a specialised anti-tank aircraft. And on the eastern front at least – albeit in relatively small numbers – the Stuka would remain in action by day until war’s end.

Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, was the last and most ambitious Blitzkrieg of them all. But despite the enormity of the undertaking, such were the Luftwaffe’s commitments elsewhere by that summer of 1941 – the defence of the occupied western territories and the fighting in the Mediterranean – that it launched the attack on Russia with far fewer aircraft than had been available to it for the assault on France and the Low Countries in the spring of the previous year.

The disparity between Stuka strengths on the eves of the two invasions was particularly striking. One source quotes the number of serviceable Ju 87s deployed in readiness for the Blitzkrieg in the west as having been 301. The comparable figure for Barbarossa is given as just 183 (with a further 24 up in the far north above the Arctic Circle).

The main assault force of Stukas – seven Gruppen in total – all came under the command of Luftflotte2 on the central sector of the front. They were divided between the air fleet’s two Fliegerkorps. Subordinated to VIII. Fliegerkorps on the left, or northern, flank of the sector were Stab StG 1 with II. and IIl./StG 1, plus Stab StG 2 with I. and IIl./StG 2. On the right, or southern, flank under II. Fliegerkorps were all three Gruppen of StG 77.

The task of the two Fliegerkorps) Stuka units was to support the armoured divisions of Panzergruppen 3 and 2 respectively as they drove eastwards in a series of giant pincer movements towards their ultimate goal – Moscow.

Accounts of the opening day of Barbarossa are nearly always dominated by the astronomical scores achieved by the Luftwaffe’s fighters both in the air and on the ground. Some 325 Soviet aircraft were shot down on 22 June 1941, the vast majority of them falling to Bf 109s. The German ]agdgruppen were also responsible for a sizeable proportion of the nearly 1500 Red Air Force machines destroyed on the ground, either by low-level strafing or by dropping hundreds of the devilish little 2-kg SD 2 ‘butterfly bombs’.

A number of Stukas also flew missions on this day armed with the ‘butterfly bomb’s’ larger counterpart, the 10-kg SD 10 anti-personnel bomb. These were carried in underwing containers and dropped indiscriminately on enemy airfields and known troop concentrations. But such scattergun tactics were a waste of the Ju 87’s unique capabilities, and during the early morning hours of 22 June most Stukas were employed in their more traditional role delivering precise attacks on pinpoint targets. III./StG 1, for example, was ordered to knock out three Red Army H Q buildings at dawn;

‘As each aircraft’s engine sprang into life, its dispersal pen was fitfully illuminated by the flickering flames from the exhaust stubs. Red, green and white lights wove through the darkness as the machines taxied to their assigned take-off positions. ‘The three aircraft of the HQ flight lifted off together at 0230 hrs, leaving a thick cloud of dust in their wake. Despite their total lack of visibility, those following all got off safely. One by one, they emerged from the dust cloud, their position lights indicating their passage as they closed up on the leaders until the Gruppe formation was complete. In the pale half-light of pre-dawn, villages, roads and railway lines could just be made out through the layers of mist blanketing the ground.’

III./StG 1 was to have rendezvoused with II. Gruppe before entering Russian airspace, but the two units failed to link up. After circling for a few minutes, Hauptmann Helmut Mahlke, the Gruppenkommandeur ofllI./StG 1, assumed – quite rightly, as it turned out – that Hauptmann Anton Keil’s II. Gruppe must have gone on ahead. He set out after them; ‘We crossed the border – a peculiar feeling. A new theatre ofwar, a new foe, but at first all remained quiet. The Soviets appeared to be fast asleep! The first bombs from II./StG 1 detonate some way off in front of us. Then it’s our turn. A few stray puffs of smoke blossom in the sky. The enemy flak has finally woken up. But the gunners’ aim is so wild and uncertain that old Stuka hands such as ourselves pay it little heed.

‘The pilots have spotted their targets. Attack! We dive almost vertically, one after the other in quick succession. In a few seconds it’s all over. The ruins of the H Q buildings are shrouded in dust, smoke and flames. We get back into formation and head for home.’

The Gruppe landed back at Dubovo-South at 0348 hrs, its first mission in-theatre having lasted just 78 minutes. Just under two hours later the aircrews set out again. This time their job was to block the approaches to the bridge spanning the River Niemen at Grodno to prevent its being blown up by the Russians. This second operation was also successful. The Grodno bridge – a potential bottleneck on Panzergruppe 3’s planned advance on Minsk, capital of white Russia – was saved from demolition and III./StG 1 again returned to base without loss.

Three more missions were flown before the day was out, two of them safeguarding further important river crossing points. The last Stuka touched down back at Dubovo-South at 2108 hrs – five operations in just under 19 hours – with the next take-off scheduled for 0330 hrs the following morning! But such was to be the norm rather than the exception during the opening rounds of Barbarossa, with all the other Stuka units being worked equally as hard. On StG l’s immediate left, the two Gruppen of Major Oskar Dinort’s StG 2 ‘Immelmann’ spent the entire 22 June ceaselessly pounding away at the Soviet frontier defences to the east and southeast of Suwalki.

Meanwhile, in II. Fliegerkorps’ sector, StG 77’s three Gruppen were engaged in smashing a breach through the Red Army’s fortified positions along the line of the River Bug. This was the jumping-off area for Panzergruppe 2’s advance eastwards along the northern edge of the Pripyet Marshes. It was here that the Soviet air force seemed to rally more quickly than elsewhere along the front. Back at their bases between missions, the Stukas of StG 77 themselves became the targets for constant waves of enemy bombers. But the unescorted Tupolevs were hacked down in droves by the defending fighters of JG 51. At Byala Podlaska alone, one pilot of II./StG 77 reported seeing 21 bombers crash nearby. Not one Stuka was damaged.

In fact, on the opening day of Barbarossa only two Ju 87s were lost to enemy action (and a third damaged from other causes) along the entire 170-mile (270 km) stretch of the central sector from the Rivel Memel down to the Pripyet.

Within 24 hours the armoured spearheads of Panzergruppen 2 and 3 were through the Soviets’ rapidly disintegrating frontier defences and racing for Minsk. Most Stuka units now reverted to their more usual role of ‘flying artillery’, supporting the German armies in the field by blasting the way clear ahead of them, and preventing the enemy from mounting counter-attacks by disrupting his lines of communication and supply.

On the northern flank of the central sector, for example, 23 June found the Ju 87s of VIII. Fliegerkorps attacking – among other objectives – rail targets 90 miles (150 km) inside enemy territory. StG 1 destroyed a number of trains carrying guns and light tanks along the stretch of line from Vilna (Vilnius), near the Lithuanian border, down to the important junction at Lida, while StG 2 targeted stations and marshalling yards, including that at Volkovisk, between Bialystok and Minsk.

On the southern flank, however, there was an added complication. Although the leading elements of Panzergruppe 2 were already well on their way towards Minsk, the frontier fortress citadel of Brest-Litovsk was still holding out. It posed a significant and ongoing threat to the Germans’ own main supply route, which passed within range of the fortress’s heavy guns. The capture of the citadel had therefore become a priority. But its metre thick walls proved impervious to artillery and mortar bombardment, and StG 77 was called upon to do its job. Yet not even the Stukas could pound the stubborn defenders into submission.

A weeklong bombardment culminated in the entire Geschwader – very nearly 100 Ju 87s in all – being despatched against the citadel’s east fort on the morning of 29 June. Although numerous direct hits were scored, the Junkers’ 600-kg (1100-lb) bombs had little effect. That afternoon a Staffel of twin-engined Ju 88s carrying 1800-kg (4000-lb) ‘Satan’ bombs was sent in and Soviet resistance was finally broken.

Meanwhile, 24 June had seen the first four Knight’s Crosses awarded to Stuka pilots serving on the eastern front. The recipients, however, all members of StG 2, were not being honoured for their actions against the Soviets over the last 48 hours, but for their previous exploits – primarily on anti-shipping operations – during the recent Greek and Cretan campaigns.

It was also on 24 June that III./StG 1 fell foul of Russian fighters. The Gruppe had already flown two missions that day without incident, but during the third (a raid on the northern outskirts of Minsk) it was attacked by half-a-dozen 1-16s. The Soviet pilots claimed six Stukas shot down, but III./StG l’s loss returns give details of only one victim – a 9. Staffel machine that went down in flames some 15 miles (25 km) northwest of Minsk. Another Ju 87, flown by Gruppenkommandeur Hauptmann Helmut Mahlke, was reportedly hit by quadruple flak and forced to land behind enemy lines. Mahlke and his gunner evaded capture and succeeded in returning to their unit three days later.

27 June was also the date on which Panzergruppen 2 and 3 closed the ring around Minskwhen their leading armoured Korps- XXXXVIL from the south and LVII. from the north -linked up on the far side of the city. Over a third of a million enemy troops were trapped in the huge pocket, or ‘cauldron’, that stretched more than 220 miles (350 km) westwards from the white Russian capital back to Bialystok and beyond.

For the next 12 days, while Luftwaffe fighters blocked every attempt by Red Air Force bombers to blast open an escape route for their encircled armies, all seven of Luftflotte 2’s Stukagruppen hurled everything they had into the battle to annihilate the Minsk-Bialystok cauldron. From their landing grounds at Lyck and Praschnitz in East Prussia, the Ju 87s of I. and III./StG 2 attacked the northern perimeter of the elongated eastwest pocket. And before the month was out, elements of StG 1 would be transferred down to Baranovichi to reinforce StG 77’s operations over the southern half of the cauldron.

But whether north or south, the targets were the same – enemy troop movements, concentrations of armour, river crossings and railway lines. Yet amid all the mayhem and destruction there was still the odd moment of humour. On one occasion a small group of German troops fought their way across a railway bridge and gained a toehold on the enemy riverbank, only for the Soviets to bring up an armoured train. Pinned down by heavy fire, the infantry called for assistance from the Stukas.

A single Staffel duly arrived on the scene and began their work with clinical precision. The first two bombs cratered the railway embankment in front of and behind the train so that it was unable to move. Then the rest of the Staffel dived down to take out the train itself. This they accomplished in short order. But two pilots were baffled as to why their bombs exploded in a wood some distance away from the track. How could they have missed a sitting target – stationary, no defensive fire, no fighters in the vicinity, their bombs not released until almost on top of the middle wagon of the armoured behemoth – by such a wide margin?

Back at base, the Staffelkapitän, who had been observing the attack, put them out of their misery. They had indeed hit the middle wagon as intended, but their bombs had bounced off the domed cupola on its roof and described a graceful parabola through the air before coming down in the trees over a hundred metres away from the track!

Like the armoured train in its final moments, the Soviet forces in the Minsk-Bialystok pocket had nowhere to go. And so they more often than not stood their ground and sent up a wall of anti-aircraft and small-arms fire whenever the Stukas appeared. Losses among the Gruppen inevitably began to mount. One casualty was future Oak Leaves winner Oberleutnant Helmut Leicht of StG 77, who was shot down and severely wounded on 28 June during his first operation on the Russian front.

By 9 July, however, it was all over. The cauldron had been reduced and nearly 324,000 Soviet troops had been taken prisoner, together with 3332 armoured vehicles and 1809 artillery pieces either captured or destroyed. Even more importantly, perhaps, the first objective had been achieved. Minsk was the western terminus of the Moscow highway. And roughly halfway along this main artery, only some 230 miles (370 km) from the Soviet capital, lay the next great prize – Smolensk.