The War of the Danish Duchies (1864)

It is the unfortunate destiny of frontier provinces to be in constant dispute between their neighbors: the unwilling, though often resigned victims of interstate tugs-of-war, sometimes going to one country, sometimes to another.

Schleswig and Holstein were two small provinces lying between Prussia and Denmark. Half of the people spoke German; the other half spoke Danish. They had been ruled by the Danish king since 1813 but were not formally part of that country. In 1863 Denmark annexed these two provinces outright.

On February 18, 1864, some Prussian hussars on patrol crossed the border and occupied the Danish village of Kolding. Denmark complained, and Bismarck, plainly seeking annexation, replied as might be expected, prevailing on Austria to support his case.

The Prussians and Austrians attacked; and the Danes, though outnumbered, put up a stubborn resistance. In two weeks, however, Denmark was defeated.

The Austrian infantry had now given up its tall cylindrical shako in favor of a conical variety not unlike the French kepi. In the field, this was encased in an oilskin cover.

In the cavalry, which consisted of cuirassiers, dragoons, hussars and lancers, there had been little change since the war in Italy. The cuirassiers discarded their cuirass in 1860, and the dragoon s, who were now wearing a modernized version of the classical helmet, had absorbed the chevaulegers in 1852. The hussars, twelve regiments strong, were clothed in light or dark blue jackets, and had breeches and pelisses to match. Their shakos were of different colors according to their regiments.

The lancers were still in dark green with red facings, and had reverted to the yellow epaulettes which had been discarded about 1840. In the Prussian Army, the pickelhaube was now firmly established as the standard headdress, although in the artillery the spike was replaced by a ball.

The Prussian dragoons at this time were wearing a light blue tunic, a color which was theirs since Napoleonic times, with facings in regimental colorings. The cuirassiers were in white and the hussars, as usual, in uniforms of different colors for every regiment. A black busby had been in wear since 1850 and the pelisse was discontinued in 1853.

The lancers, or uhlans, wore the traditional lancers’ dress of Polish origin (i.e., the square-topped lance-cap and distinctive tunic, orulanka, of blue cloth with regimental facing colors).

In the infantry of the line, a dark blue tunic had been authorized in 1843, with red collar-patches. The trousers were of a very dark blue, almost black, with red piping down the sides.

The light infantry were termed jager and wore the 1843 tunic, but in dark green with red collar-patches. A helmet was issued originally, but replaced in 1854 by a tall conical shako with a peak back and front.

The Danish infantry was in dark blue kepi s and tunics, piped red, and light blue trousers, while the dragoons and hussars wore light blue tunics with a ‘Roman’ helmet for the dragoons and probably a shako for the hussars.

Peace was signed on August I, 1864 and ratified on October 30. The King of Denmark renounced all his rights in favor of the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia. The duchies were merged in the larger Question of the relations between these two powers, who were soon fighting each other; Prussia finally established her supremacy at Sadowa in 1866.

The Brabant Rebellion (1789)

Revolution was in the air as the eighteenth century drew to its close. The success of the American colonists’ venture may have prompted other liberal minds in Europe to attempt similar action, especially in view of the friendship which had sprung up between France and the United States – a logical conclusion to the help which the French had given the Americans.

In 1789, the Belgian province of Brabant was under Austrian rule, as part of the Netherlands. T he people, however, enjoyed certain inherited rights which they were anxious to preserve, and when the Emperor Joseph II attempted to infringe upon these rights, trouble was bound to ensue. T he news from France was sufficient incentive, and very soon undisguised revolution broke out, led by Henry Van der Noot.

As usual, thousands of local patriots formed themselves into sundry military units, each with its own uniform, but all marching under the colors which have since become those of the nation al flag of Belgium- black, yellow and red. These are based upon the heraldic arms of the Province: black for the field of the blazon, yellow for the Lion of Brabant and red for its tongue and claws.

The uniforms, fortunately, were recorded on the spot by an artist whose work may still be seen in the Royal Army Museum in Brussels – a remarkable collection of very detailed paintings. On the whole, the pattern is French in character, particularly in the cut of the garments and the wearing of epaulettes in the French manner by the officers. Thus, the Ypres Volunteers, for example, could easily be mistaken for French infantry of the period were it not for their black lapels and the Belgian colors in their plume and cockade.

The same might be said of the Tongerloo Dragoons, but here the cuff is of a very distinctive pattern, which is repeated, incidentally, in the Brussels Volunteers. It was not usual, at this period, to find troops wearing pointed cuffs with a central cuff-slash bearing a row of buttons. T he conventional design, where buttons were included, was to sew these on a rectangular up right sash covering a square cuff.

The country was liberated on December 17, 1789. The following day Van der Noot and his staff made their triumphal entry into Brussels after only six weeks fighting.

LINK

Battle of Kursk, (5–13 July 1943)

Major Eastern Front battle and the largest tank engagement in history. The Battle of Kursk demonstrated the end of German dominance on the Eastern Front. The 1942–1943 winter campaign had left a 120-mile-wide bulge around Kursk, an important rail junction north of Belgorod and Kharkov, protruding 75 miles deep into German-held territory.

Adolf Hitler saw the salient as an opportunity. By reducing it, his army could regain prestige lost by previous setbacks. By April, plans to blast the Soviets from Kursk were under discussion, and they were solidified into Operation ZITADELLE (CITADEL) by early May. The plan was to reduce the salient with two armor-led pincer attacks at the northern and southern shoulders that would meet in the middle, surrounding all of the forces in the pocket. From the north near Orel, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge’s Army Group Center would launch General Walther Model’s Ninth Army, led by two panzer corps. The main thrust, however, would come in the south from Field Marshal Fritz Eric von Manstein’s Army Group South, with Colonel General Hermann Hoth’s Fourth Panzer Army moving north from near Belgorod.

Hitler left the start date for the operation open to sometime after 1 May. He then delayed it to June and again to July in order to build up the panzer forces with newly developed heavy Tiger and Panther tanks and Ferdinand 88 mm self-propelled assault guns, although they had been rushed into production and suffered from design flaws.

The Soviets knew of the plans for the impending German offensive through reconnaissance and intelligence agents. Soviet leader Josef Stalin wanted a preemptive spoiling attack, but Stavka representative Marshal Georgii Zhukov convinced him that within the Kursk salient, the Central Front, under General Konstantin Rokossovsky, and General Nikolai Vatutin’s Voronezh Front would be able to absorb the initial German blows with the defenses they had established, and to the rear, General I. S. Konev’s Steppe Front could then counterattack.

Both sides built up armor and troop concentrations for the coming battle. The Germans amassed 900,000 men in 50 divisions, of which 19 were panzer and motorized, with 2,700 tanks and assault guns, 10,000 artillery pieces, and 2,000 aircraft. The delay, however, allowed the Soviets to assemble 1.3 million men, 3,600 tanks, 20,000 artillery pieces, and 2,400 aircraft. Some 300,000 local civilians joined the Red Army in laying a massive array of tank traps, minefields, and dug-in antitank guns designed to channel the German armor into kill zones for Soviet artillery.

The German attack commenced on 5 July. In the north, the Ninth Army assaulted on a narrow, 30-mile front but managed to penetrate only 6 or 7 miles in seven days of fierce fighting. The fighting resembled some of the fierce attrition battles of World War I. Fourth Panzer Army in the south did slightly better, pushing to the third Soviet defensive belt about 20 miles deep. The critical stage of the battle came between 11 and 12 July when General Hoth turned his panzer spearhead northwest to envelope the Soviet 1st Tank Army, and with about 400 tanks, his forces reached Prokhorovka Station. Zhukov responded with a counterattack of five tank armies, two coming from the Steppe Front. This engagement was a cauldron embroiling more than 1,200 tanks from both sides (three-quarters of them Soviet) in the largest tank battle of the war. By the end of 12 July, Prokhorovka lay littered with the burned-out hulks of German and Soviet tanks.

At that point, on 13 July, Hitler called off the offensive in order to withdraw panzer forces to reinforce units in Sicily, where the Allies had landed three days earlier. The German commanders had no choice but to conduct a fighting retreat in the face of a Soviet counteroffensive that began on 12 July. By 5 August, the Soviets had retaken Orel and Belgorod, and they retook Kharkov by 23 August, an action that the Soviets consider to be part of the Battle of Kursk. By that reckoning, Kursk involved 4 million men, 13,000 armored vehicles, and 12,000 aircraft, making it one of the largest battles of the war.

In the Battle of Kursk, the Germans lost an estimated 70,000 men killed, 2,900 tanks, 195 self-propelled guns, 844 artillery pieces, and 1,392 planes. More important, the battle cost the German army the strategic initiative. The Germans now began an almost continuous retreat that would end in Berlin.

References

Glantz, David M., and Jonathan M. House. When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.

Jukes, Geoffrey. Kursk: The Clash of Armour. New York: Ballantine Books, 1968.

Salisbury, Harrison E. The Unknown War. New York: Bantam Books, 1978.

Werth, Alexander. Russia at War, 1941–1945. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1964.

German Heavy AFVS

The Tiger was one of the German responses to the appearance of new Soviet tanks in 1941 and in particular of the T-34. At the time the German Army had no heavy tanks, except for a few experimental vehicles. However, once the new Russian tanks were encountered the German High Command realised the need for tanks more powerful than the existing Pz.Kpfw.IV. In consequence two new tanks were hurriedly developed. One was the 56 ton Tiger, whose design incorporated some features of one of the earlier experimental tanks but which was armed with a tank version of the 88mm anti-aircraft gun that had already proved highly effective as an anti-tank weapon. The other was a new medium tank which became the Panther, a 43 ton vehicle armed with a 70 calibre long, high velocity 75mm gun. The Panther began to be produced in January 1943 and, together with the Tiger, gave the German tank units a qualitative superiority over the Russian tank units. But both tanks were produced on a relatively small scale, the total production of the original Tiger I amounting to 1354 and that of the Panthers to 5976 (1.75). In consequence, there were not enough Panthers to reequip the Panzer divisions completely with them and the Tigers were generally held back in independent battalions.

Both tanks had the same general layout as Pz.Kpfw.IV and five-man crews but apart from having much more powerful armament and thicker armour they were much more advanced mechanically. As a result of its combination of characteristics the Panther came to be regarded as the best medium tank of the 1943-45 period while the second version of the Tiger became the most powerful tank to be used during the Second World War. Thus, Tiger II was armed with a higher performance 88mm gun which was 71 calibres long and which could pierce considerably thicker armour than the 122mm gun of the IS-2. It was also heavily armoured, its frontal hull armour being 150mm thick, although this contributed to its weight of 68 tons, which made it the heaviest tank used during the war. But the total production of Tiger II amounted to only 489 vehicles.

In the meantime, while the Tiger and the Panther were being developed, the existing German tanks were belatedly armed with more powerful guns. In particular, Pz.Kpfw.IV was armed in 1942 with more powerful 75mm guns, first 43 and then 48 calibres long, instead of the short barrelled gun of 24 calibres, which had been used in German tanks since the Grosstraktoren of 1929.

New designs and improved versions of the existing vehicles developed in response to the appearance of the T-34 and KV not only made German tanks more than a match for the Soviet tanks in terms of gun-power but also put them well ahead of British and US tanks.

Post-War Heavy Tank Abandoned

During the 1960s there was also a shift of emphasis from nuclear weapons back to conventional forces as a result of the onset of strategic parity between the United States and the Soviet Union. In view of this and the fact that the armoured forces of the United States and its allies continued to be numerically inferior to those of the Soviet Union, the US Army made a major effort to gain qualitative superiority by developing in collaboration with the German Army a ‘revolutionary new tank’, which was designated MBT-70 (2.5). However, the MBT-70 programme proved to be over-ambitious and was terminated in 1971 by the US Congress on grounds of excessive cost. In consequence, the US Army embarked in 1972 on the development of a more conventional tank, the XM-1.

The controversy surrounding the MBT-70 obscured a significant change that had taken place at the time in US Army policy in favour of a single type of battle tank. The MBT-70 embodied it and moves towards it had already resulted in the withdrawal from service in 1964 of US heavy tanks. The Soviet Army retained its heavy tanks for several more years and they formed part of the Soviet forces which invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. But during the 1970s the Soviet Army also concentrated on a single type of battle tank, as did other armies.

A policy of concentration on a single type of battle tank was eminently sensible because no other tank could be superior to it and. therefore, could be justified if the tank on which development concentrated was already as good as it could be as a battle tank. Other types of tanks could always be designed, of course, for different, special roles but they were bound to be inferior, overall, to the more versatile battle tanks designed to defeat the widest possible range of battlefield targets, including enemy tanks.

An extreme example of tanks designed for such special roles were the infantry and cruiser tanks which the British Army employed right up to the end of the Second World War in spite of their serious deficiencies. However, in 1944 while British troops were still fighting in Normandy, their commander, General Montgomery, proposed the abolition of the division between infantry and cruiser tanks and the adoption instead of a single type of ‘capital’ tank. As it happens, the latter was eventually developed into a heavy gun tank, which was used in small numbers between 1955 and 1966. But in the meantime the policy of using a single type of battle tank was put into effect with the adoption as such of the Centurion tank in 1949.

The French Army decided even earlier than the British to concentrate on a single type of battle tank. In fact, such a tank began to be considered even before the war ended and was developed as part of the French Army’s post-war re-equipment programme. However, its development did not proceed beyond a number of prototypes and was abandoned in the mid-1950s when the French Army turned its attention to another and lighter type of battle tank. The latter stemmed from an agreement reached in 1957 with Germany to produce a common ‘European’ tank although, eventually, each country adopted its own design. But the French AMX-30 and the German Leopard retained at least one feature in common in being less heavily armoured than other contemporary tanks such as the British Chieftain and, to a lesser extent, the US M60 tank. In this respect their design reflected the view, which had become widespread, that heavy armour was no longer as valuable as it had been because of progress in the development of anti-tank guided missiles and other weapons with shaped charge warheads that could perforate the thickest tank armour.

A debt owed to General Walker

Gen. Walton Walker (1889-1950), the commander of the U.S. Eighth Army, provided the foothold for the Incheon landing by defending the 240-kilometer-long (149.1 mile) front line along the Nakdong River from Yeongdeok to Masan, spanning 160 kilometers north to south and 80 kilometers east to west. He set foot on Korean soil on July 13, 1950. As the military situation turned against the U.S.-South Korea joint forces, under the auspices of the United Nations, the commander of the U.S. 25th Division gave an evacuation order on July 29.

However, according to a book on the Korean War written by Kim Haeng-bok, General Walker rushed to the front line and gave a strong order: “Stand or die! … We are fighting against time. What is at stake is whether the North Korean army occupies Busan first, or the U.S. enforcements Gen. Douglas MacArthur promised will land on Korean soil first. From now on, there is no evacuation or retreat. There is no more room for retreat. Retreating to Busan means a massacre of the largest number of people in history. Therefore, we have to fight till the end. Being a prisoner of war is even worse than sacrificing our lives in the battle. Yielding even an inch of land to enemy hand is not rewarding the sacrifices thousands of our comrades have made.”

It was only because General Walker determinedly defended the Nakdong River front line with the order “Stand or die!” that Koreans could sing a war song, which goes: “We march forward and forward/ over the bodies of comrades./ Farewell to the Nakdong River./ We are marching on/ after defeating the enemy./ Our grudge smolders in our blood.”

He saved the fate of a newly born republic that was on the brink of collapse. At that critical moment, he was with us.

Although the South Korea-U.S. forces advanced to the Amnok (Yalu) River, the military situation turned against us due to the intervention of the Chinese Army. On Dec. 23, 1950, General Walker was on his way to deliver the Enseong Military Medal to his son. President Syngman Rhee awarded the medal to Walker’s only son, Capt. Sam Walker, who served with distinction in warding off the offensives of the Chinese army. Unfortunately, he was in a traffic accident near Uijeongbu and was killed at the age of 61.

In memory of General Walker, the hill near Gwangjang-dong, Gwangjin District, where there were leisure facilities for the U.S. Forces Korea, was named Walker Hill. At the foot of the hill near the main entrance to the Sheraton Walkerhill Hotel stands a commemorative monument on which is written: “We Koreans cherish the memory of General Walker because he was the only person who insisted on defending the Korean Peninsula, when the atmosphere in Washington in the early stage of the Korean War was complete withdrawal of all United Nations Forces from the peninsula.”

The writer is the dean of the school of liberal arts at Kyung Hee University

By Huh Dong-hyun

STEAM TACTICS

Damaged HMS Camperdown’s bow after collision with HMS Victoria.

‘Steam tactics’, the means of manoeuvring steam powered naval forces in peace and war, were an obsession of navies in the Ironclad Age. They maintain their fascination, as is shown in these sets of diagrams, published nearly 100 years apart, which attempt to analyse the Victoria-Camperdown collision in 1893. The figures are reproduced without any of the accompanying text, simply to indicate the conundrums that become apparent when such manoeuvres go wrong.

DOOMED TACTICAL THEORY

It was clear from the early days of steam power that manoeuvres designed to bring ships into action could potentially be made more precise and certain than they had been under sail alone. Movement in the required direction, and alterations of course and speed, were not only more likely to be achieved but could be predicted by experimental data; ships’ turning circles were known, and the number of revolutions per minute that their screws were ordered to make – readily adjusted by the engineers on the throttles – regulated their speed. Thus the difficulties of getting a fleet into nearly simultaneous action, that had bedevilled sailing navies through previous centuries and helped to produce such debacles as Toulon in 1744 and Minorca in 1756, could in theory be minimized by the miracle of steam.

But even when the complexities of steam-with-sail had dropped away, by about 1875, the handling of a large fleet under steam alone did present problems. Simple formations such as the single line could be unwieldy, causing great station keeping difficulty for the rearmost ships, and inappropriate too when a more compact formation was required. But more complex formations were difficult to alter without elaborate manoeuvring or radical alterations of course and speed by some of the ships involved.

These difficulties were addressed by the Royal Navy in great (almost certainly excessive) detail in the late 1870s and throughout the 1880s. The Mediterranean Fleet under Admiral Sir Geoffrey Phipps Hornby took great pride in its elaborate demonstration of ’steam tactics’, and its tight control was never better shown than in the deterrent passage of the Dardanelles in 1878. This was expressly designed to impress foreigners, and did. Moreover, Phipps Hornby, though a great practitioner of the set piece, was also a clear-thinking leader and had he been called upon to go to war he would almost certainly have found a way out of elaboration into the simplicity required for battle, even with the heterogeneous force at his command.

It was not so with lesser commanders. During the 1880s manoeuvres became ever more complicated, signals proliferated and the more radical officers in the fleet complained – in private – of ‘goose-stepping’ exercises involving enormous displays of bunting that had less and less relevance to the business of getting a fleet into action. As Andrew Gordon has rightly written, product was subordinated to process; the end was forgotten, the means were everything. The revised signal book of 1889 was in two volumes and had over 500 pages.

An attempt to cut through the flummery and return to first principles was made by Sir George Tryon when he became Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean in 1891. A man of fertile mind and dominating personality, he instituted a system of simple signals that were designed for use in action, when smoke might obscure visibility and signal halyards be shot away. The fleet, and most other flag officers, reacted with relief, though there were some who believed they could work the old system even in action. But Tryon tragically died when his flagship Victoria was rammed by the Camperdown on 22 June 1893. The bitter irony was that the collision occurred not during one of Tryon’s free battle manoeuvres, but in a formal set-piece alteration of formation; and that it was due almost certainly to a simple aberration of mind, stubbornly persisted in, by Tryon himself. He was heard to say after the disaster, and before he went down with his flagship, ‘It is all my fault.’

However irrelevant the disaster might be in assessing the validity of Tryon’s theories for battle manoeuvres, it did in fact serve to discredit them, and the Royal Navy reverted to its previous formalism. The tension between the two ways of handling a fleet – which was much older than steam, and persisted well after the First World War – was resolved temporarily in favour of deference and obedience to rigid control.

HELIGOLAND BIGHT 28 AUGUST 1914

The battle of the Heligoland Bight had degenerated into a confused melee in which British light forces were being worsted, when Beatty took a bold gamble by intervening with battlecruisers in heavily mined waters. The resulting rout was greatly damaging to German morale.

In July 1914, even before his appointment, Jellicoe had concluded in a lengthy memorandum to the First Lord that ‘it is highly dangerous to consider that our ships are superior or even equal [to those of the enemy]‘. Had he known that British projectiles would be liable to break up harmlessly on striking German armour, he would have been even more circumspect.

On 28 August 1914 Commodore Tyrwhitt’s Harwich Force forayed against German light forces active in the Heligoland Bight. In uncertain visibility and in the face of rapid German reinforcement, the British were soon hard-pressed and Tyrwhitt called for assistance from the two battlecruisers that comprised his deep cover. Jellicoe had not been able to inform him that he had reinforced them with three more battlecruisers under Vice Admiral Sir David Beatty. The impetuous Beatty did not hesitate to sweep in with all five capital ships. He sank three enemy cruisers but risked his big ships to mines and to uninformed friendly submarines. While the victory was due to overwhelming force rather than good planning, it boosted British morale and caused the Kaiser to think even more defensively.

Unsuspected by the Germans, the British had obtained several of their naval codebooks. Used in conjunction with a chain of radio intercept and direction-finding stations, these proved a valuable indicator of German activity and intentions. The hub of this service was the Admiralty’s later-famous ‘Room 40′, loosely controlled by Captain William R. (‘Blinker’) Hall, the Director of Naval Intelligence.

To popular disappointment, the Grand Fleet did not seek a second Trafalgar but adopted a policy of containment. The Germans responded by endeavouring to erode its superiority. By using Vice Admiral Franz von Hipper’s battlecruisers to bombard English east coast towns it was hoped that Royal Navy squadrons would be goaded into pursuit, to be led into minefields or submarine traps, or into ambush by superior German forces.

Still lacking experience, Room 40 failed to warn of Hipper’s first such foray when, on 3 November 1914, he shelled Great Yarmouth for twenty minutes while a cruiser mined the coastal shipping lane. In accordance with his Kaiser’s instructions, von Ingenohl brought his two supporting battle squadrons no further than the Bight.

Admiral Fisher, the First Sea Lord, predicted further such provocations and was proved correct when Room 40 discovered one due for 16 December. As Hipper’s force alone was specifically identified, only Beatty’s battlecruisers and one battle squadron were directed to intercept, with the Harwich Force also at sea. Von Ingenohl, too, was out in support with the battle fleet and his scouting forces clashed with those of the British in the pre-dawn darkness. Fearing that he was risking an action with the whole Grand Fleet, he broke away Beatty, unwittingly let off the hook, and still assuming the enemy to be Hipper alone, actually pursued this enormous quarry until, at 8.54 a.m., he received word that Scarborough was being bombarded. Within half an hour, unaware of Beatty’s approach or von Ingenohl’s retreat, Hipper withdrew. He was contacted by British light cruisers but these lost the scent due to an ambiguous signal from Beatty.

Although the raids held no military significance, the Admiralty was stung by vehement press opinion and its own inability to guarantee intervention.

HELLENISTIC ARMIES – Later Macedonian Cavalry

Later Macedonian Cavalry

All Hellenistic armies maintained the basic order bequeathed to them by Alexander. Their core was formed by the ordinary troops of the infantry phalanx linked to other formations. On the right they were linked to a unit of elite phalanx infantry equivalent to guards units called by various titles connected with the characteristics of their shields. At various times they are known as either the hypaspists, silver shields or bronze shields. One subunit consisted of the royal bodyguard, the Agema, a title also used in Alexander’s army late in his reign. That elite formation linked the infantry to the elite Companion cavalry units, including the royal horse guard, on the right where the king was often stationed. The other wing was also formed of cavalry, with light-armed infantry and horse also posted on the flanks or to the front as flank guards and to provide for an elastic offensive and defense. The close imitation of Alexander’s model is clear. The increasing use of foreign mercenaries must have made the appearance of these armies far more diverse than earlier formations. One new development was the use of true reserve troops behind the lines.

There was little change in tactics in the three centuries after Alexander. For about a century the basic goal of the commander was to create a gap in the enemy army, as at Paraetacene, or to strip the infantry of its cavalry support by driving it off. The cost of training and maintaining cavalry gradually led to the growing importance of the infantry phalanx. Later battles were often slogging matches between phalanxes, as at Sellasia in 222 or Raphia in 217. A feature retained from the Classical period and transmitted through Alexander was the notion of an offensive and defensive wing. The destruction of Demetrius’ offensive cavalry wing at the battle of Gaza in 312, despite a shield of light-armed troops, ended his chances of success.

The general characteristics of large set-piece battles in the Hellenistic period are remarkably stable. The armies were homogeneous in equipment and training if not in ethnic composition. As in siege warfare, there was some technological experiment, especially with the use of elephants, but the older arms remain decisive.

CAVALRY

Given the expense and difficulty of maintaining a cavalry force, the ratio between cavalry and infantry constantly decreased in the course of the period in the major Hellenistic armies. It fell from about one to five after Alexander to about one to eight by the end of the third century. The highest figure we possess is a combined force of about 21,000 cavalry out of a total of all armed forces of 155,000 at Ipsus in 301. Heavy cavalry gradually changed its role from that of deciding the battle to one in which its main task by the later Hellenistic period, as at Raphia, was to defeat the opposing cavalry and ensure that the infantry could advance unmolested. Cavalry still had the same uses as it had in the Classical period. It still was unable to face unbroken heavy infantry and would only be able to do so after the technological advances that resulted in the stirrup and an appropriate saddle as well as larger horses. Light cavalry was also used in this period as a flank guard or screen and to provide an elastic defense, an advance owed to Alexander and visible already at Gaugamela.

281. Polybius, Histories 12.18.2–3=Callisthenes FGrH 124 F35

We know very little about Hellenistic cavalry formations. The largest unit seems typically to have been the hipparchy, as it was in the later army of Alexander, and below that came the ila. The smallest unit was the oulamos. If we accept Polybius’ figures it may be that an ila contained 128 men. These calculations are part of Polybius’ criticism of an earlier historian’s account of the battle of the Issus.

There were thirty thousand cavalry, as Callisthenes himself says, and thirty thousand mercenaries. It is easy to figure out how much space is required to contain them; for the majority of cavalry are arrayed eight deep for real effectiveness and between each ila there needs to be a space equal to the frontage of the troop to allow them to wheel and to easily face about.

282. Polybius Histories 3.117.4–5

Polybius is referring to the cavalry flank and rear attacks on the Roman force that completed the encirclement of that force and assured its defeat. It is the vulnerability of isolated heavy infantry that is uppermost in the historians mind.

All the rest [of the Romans], about seventy thousand, died bravely. At this battle [Cannae] and in earlier actions their cavalry was crucial to the Carthaginians. This made it clear to posterity that it is better to give battle with half as many infantry as the enemy but to have an overwhelming superiority in cavalry, than to go into battle evenly matched in all respects.

MACEDONIA

With the establishment of the Antigonid house in Macedonia, quiet finally settled over a state that had been under almost constant military pressure since Alexander. Perhaps half of those eligible for military service had been swept away in the fifty years since Alexander’s death in war or through emigration.

The Macedonian kings were conscious of the need to husband their manpower and hired mercenaries not only for long-term garrison duties but also as expendable substitutes for their own forces. A number of treaties are extant between Cretan cities and the Macedonian kings arranging for mercenary service. The use of mercenaries was limited by the slender resources of the Antigonids in comparison to their rivals. The national army had a fairly constant number of effectives of around twenty-five thousand. The officer core was still composed of Macedonian nobles. Like the Aetolian and Achaean Leagues, its major rivals, it possessed a citizen army as its core. The destruction of the Macedonian monarchy by the Romans in 167 was more the result of superior Roman manpower and than of any decrease in the effectiveness of Macedonia’s army.

301. Diodorus Siculus, 18.12.2

The movement referred to in this passage is a rising of many of the Greek states under Athenian leadership in the wake of Alexander’s death, the Lamian War. It is crucial to note that the League’s early successes appear to have been due to the lack of manpower experienced by the Macedonian regent Antipater. It was the return of time-expired Macedonian veterans that made the eventual Macedonian victory in the next year possible.

When [Antipater] learned of the concerted movement of the Greeks that had taken place against him, he left Sippias as general of Macedonia, gave him enough troops and ordered him to conduct a levy of as many as possible. He assembled his army of thirteen thousand Macedonians and six thousand cavalry. (At this time Macedonia lacked citizen-soldiers because of the great number that had been sent off to Asia as replacements for the army.)

302. Diodorus Siculus, 20.110.3–4

The reference is to Demetrius’ Macedonian campaign against his rival Cassander in 302. It ended in a compromise because of his need to come to his father’s aid in Asia. The passage illustrates what appears to have been a fairly typical Macedonian force in the years after Alexander death.

As Cassander saw that Demetrius’ affairs were going forward according to the latter’s plans, he more strongly garrisoned in advance Thebes and Pherae and gathered all of his forces and encamped opposite Demetrius’ army. Cassander had a total of 29,000 foot and 2000 horsemen. Demetrius had 1500 cavalry and not less than 8000 Macedonian infantry; his mercenary forces was 10,500, there were also light-armed formations and all types of adventurers who had assembled for war and pillage and who numbered more than 18,000; the resulting grand total was about 56,000 foot.

Galla Placidia (ca. 390–450)

Daughter of the Roman emperor Theodosius taken hostage by the Visigoths. Galla Placidia exemplifies the use of important women as political plunder in warfare. Like many women in that position, however, Galla Placidia succeeded in using her role as pawn to the advantage of the Roman Empire and her own family.

Galla Placidia was the daughter of Emperor Theodosius the Great (379–395) and his second wife Galla. With Theodosius’s death, the western empire fell to Galla Placidia’s half-brother Honorius, who disastrously misjudged the demands of his Visigothic allies and provoked a Germanic invasion of the Italian peninsula. The Visigoths tried for years to force the emperor to make a more favorable treaty and finally resorted to sacking the city of Rome in August 410. At some point in the process, the Visigoths captured the princess Galla Placidia, who certainly witnessed the sack of Rome and may have been living in the city at the time of the attack.

The Visigoths took Galla Placidia as a hostage. They treated her well, and she was able to influence her captors to make peace with the Romans and settle down as federates in Gaul. Apparently to confirm this new treaty, Galla Placidia married the Gothic king Athaulf. That was not the end of her political utility. She was soon widowed and given back to the Romans as a condition of a peace treaty in 416. Once she was safely in Roman hands, her brother Honorius arranged Galla Placidia’s marriage as a reward to the victorious general Constantius, cementing a political deal through which Constantius soon became coemperor with Honorius.

Galla Placidia was not allowed to play an independent political role until she was well into her thirties. In 425, her six-year-old son became Emperor Valentinian III, and Galla Placidia ruled the western empire as his regent until 437. During that period, an important part of her duty was an increasingly desperate effort to deal with growing pressure from the Germans. The Vandals invaded Roman North Africa in 429, and other Germanic peoples began to settle in Roman territory. Galla Placidia and her councilors took the only possible course, paying the Germans to fight against each other. It was not a great age in Roman military history.

Still, Galla Placidia’s career is instructive. For the most part she was a political pawn, but her marriages demonstrate how women could serve as a vital link in creating peace both internally and externally during the later Roman Empire. When she finally reached a position of authority in the state, Galla Placidia’s response did not differ from that of male members of the imperial family—a deepening financial crisis made any significant military response to the German invaders impossible.

References and Further Reading

Holum, Kenneth G. 1982. Theodosian Empresses. Berkeley: University of California.

Oost, Stewart. 1968. Galla Placidia Augusta. Chicago: University of Chicago.

Lotta Svärd, Finland

Two women of the Finnish Lotta Svärd read from books, 1942. The purpose of the Lotta Svärd, a volunteer organization made up of Finnish women, was to boost national morale and support the civil guard.

Finnish women’s auxiliary corps. At the height of its activities, which date from 1922 to 1944, Lotta Svärd had some 200,000 members and a highly developed nationwide organization that combined work in vocational, religious, and ideological education; in social service; in homefront civil defense; and in various forms of battlefield support. The organization was affiliated with the reserve of the Finnish Defense Forces, the Civil Guards, and during the severe manpower shortages of the Russo-Finnish wars of 1939–1940 and 1941–1944, it came to play a crucial part in the Finnish war effort. Its name refers to a fictional character, Lotta Svärd, in J. L. Runeberg’s Tales of Ensign Stål (1848), who went to the front during the Finnish War of 1808–1809 to feed and care for soldiers fighting the Russians.

The origins of the Lotta Svärd lay in the women’s volunteer groups of the victorious White side of the Finnish civil war of 1918. Because the organization always stood for the bourgeois, Protestant, and antisocialist ideologies of the Whites, until the outbreak of the Winter War of 1939–1940, it remained deeply suspect in the eyes of the Finnish left. This suspicion was increased after 1927, when the Lotta Svärd was called on to assist the White Civil Guards to protect the Lutheran religion, home, and country and to elevate patriotism and civic-mindedness in general. Additional duties of the Lotta Svärd included the manufacture and maintenance of military uniforms, commissary duties in the Defence Forces, recruitment and fund-raising, as well as the upkeep of cemeteries for war dead and aid to war invalids, widows, and orphans. Whether undertaken in peacetime or in war, all this was voluntary, unpaid work.

During the Winter War with the Soviet Union, Lotta members were not allowed into combat, but they did take up tasks in air raid and naval defense and in military communications, as well as in the supply, maintenance, and production of military clothes and equipment, in running a total of eight field hospitals, and in managing the relocation and care of a half a million evacuees from the lost territories of eastern Finland. Up to 3,000 Lotta members served in antiaircraft defense during the war, many of them on the Karelian Isthmus. Forty-nine Lottas were killed in that war. During the War of 1941–1944, the organization was even more deeply involved in battlefield support, and it has been estimated that the activities of its so-called battlefield-Lottas freed up to a division of men for battlefield duties. Their constantly increasing involvement in battlefield support meant that by the end of the war the Lotta organization had suffered 113 battlefield-related deaths and 661 casualties.

Labeled a fascist organization by the Soviet Union, the Lotta Svärd was abolished by the Soviet-dominated Control Commission that oversaw the pacification of Finland between the Finnish surrender of September 1944 and the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947. Lotta Svärd’s ideological values were later nurtured by a heritage association, the Lotta Svärd Perinneliitto [Heritage Association], and some of its social functions by the new women’s social service organization, Naisten Huoltosäätiö [Finnish Women’s Welfare Association], but after 1944, no actual women’s auxiliary corps existed in Finland.

References and Further Reading

Ollila, Aino 1996.“Women’s Voluntary Associations in Finland during the 1920s and 1930s.” Scandinavian Journal of History 20: 97–107.

Olsson, Pia 1995. “‘Learn to Love Your Country and Its People’: From Lotta Ideology to Action.” In Encountering Ethnicities: Ethnological Aspects on Ethnicity, Identity and Migration, edited by Teppo Korhonen. Helsinki: SKS.