Category Archives: Britain

by | 22 June 2009 · 6:06 am

WW2: National Armies vs. Imperial Armies

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 516-518:

The Axis powers were fighting not only against the British, Russians and Americans; they were fighting against the combined forces of the British, Russian and American empires as well. The total numbers of men fielded by the various parts of the British Empire were immense. All told, the United Kingdom itself mobilized just under six million men and women. But an additional 5.1 million came from India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Victories like El Alamein and even more so Imphal were victories for imperial forces as much as for British forces; the colonial commitment to the Empire proved every bit as strong as in the First World War. Especially remarkable was the fact that more than two and a half million Indians volunteered to serve in the British Indian Army during the war – more than sixty times the number who fought for the Japanese. The rapid expansion of the Indian officer corps provided a crucial source of loyalty, albeit loyalty that was conditional on post-war independence. The Red Army was also much more than just a Russian army. In January 1944 Russians accounted for 58 per cent of the 200 infantry divisions for which records are available, but Ukrainians accounted for 22 per cent, an order of magnitude more than fought on the German side, and a larger proportion than their share of the pre-war Soviet population. Half the soldiers of the Soviet 62nd Army at Stalingrad were not Russians. The American army, too, was ethnically diverse. Although they were generally kept in segregated units, African-Americans accounted for around 11 per cent of total US forces mobilized and fought in all the major campaigns from Operation Torch onwards. Norman Mailer’s reconnaissance platoon in The Naked and the Dead includes two Jews, a Pole, an Irishman, a Mexican and an Italian. Two of the six servicemen who raised the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima were of foreign origin; one was a Pima Indian. More than 20,000 Japanese-Americans served in the US army during the war….

The Germans, as we have seen, had made some efforts to mobilize other peoples in occupied Europe, as had the Japanese in the Far East, but these were dwarfed by what the Allies achieved. Indeed, the abject failure of the Axis empires to win the loyalty of their new subjects ensured that Allied forces were reinforced by a plethora of exile forces, partisan bands and resistance organizations. Even excluding these auxiliaries, the combined armed forces of the principal Allies were already just under 30 per cent larger than those of the Axis in 1942. A year later the difference was more than 50 per cent. By the end of the war, including also Free French* and Polish forces, Yugoslav partisans and Romanians fighting on the Russian side, the Allies had more than twice as many men under arms. Fifty-two different nationalities were represented in the Jewish Brigade formed by the British in 1944. They followed an earlier wave of 9,000 or so refugees from Spain, Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia who had joined the so-called Alien Companies, nicely nicknamed the ‘King’s Own Loyal Enemy Aliens’.

The best measure of the Allied advantage was in terms of military hardware, however, since it was with capital rather than labour – with machinery rather than manpower – that the Germans and the Japanese were ultimately to be defeated. In every major category of weapon, the Axis powers fell steadily further behind with each passing month. Between 1942 and 1944, the Allies out-produced the Axis in terms of machine pistols by a factor of 16 to 1, in naval vessels, tanks and mortars by roughly 5 to 1, and in rifles, machine-guns, artillery and combat aircraft by roughly 3 to 1.

*It is seldom acknowledged that for most of the period from 1940 until D-Day, black Africans constituted the main elements of the rank and file in the Free French Army. Even as late as September 1944, they still accounted for 1 in 5 of de Gaulle’s force in North-West Europe.

I did not quote the immediately preceding section that compares the mismatch in purely economic terms, but I cannot resist quoting the footnote appended to the end of it (on p. 516):

‘We must at all costs advance into the plains of Mesopotamia and take the Mosul oilfields from the British,’ declared Hitler on August 5, 1942. ‘If we succeed here, the whole war will come to an end.’ But three-quarters of total world oil production in 1944 came from the United States, compared with just 7 per cent from the whole of North Africa, the Middle East and the Gulf.

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Filed under Africa, anglosphere, Asia, Britain, economics, Europe, France, Germany, industry, Japan, labor, military, nationalism, U.S., USSR, war

by | 12 June 2009 · 5:17 pm

Blitzkrieg: British Theory, German Practice

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 386-387:

Blitzkrieg is, of course, a German word meaning ‘lightning war’. The ironic thing is that it was in many ways a British invention, derived from the lessons of the Western Front in the First World War. Captain Basil Liddell Hart had drawn his own conclusions from the excessively high casualties suffered by both sides. As an infantry subaltern, he himself had been gassed, the long-term effects of which forced him to retire from the army in 1927, after which he turned to journalism, working as defence correspondent for the Daily Telegraph and then The Times and publishing numerous works of military history. In Liddell Hart’s view, the fatal mistake of most offensives on the Western Front had been their ponderous and predictable directness. A more ‘indirect approach’, he argued, would aim at surprising the enemy, throwing his commanders off balance, and then exploiting the ensuing confusion. The essence was to concentrate armour and air power in a lethal lightning strike. Liddell Hart defined the secret as lying

partly in the tactical combination of tanks and aircraft, partly in the unexpectedness of the stroke in direction and time, but above all in the ‘follow-through’ – the way that a break-through is exploited by a deep strategic penetration; carried out by armoured forces racing on ahead of the main army, and operating independently.

The good news for Liddell Hart was that his work was hugely influential. The bad news was that it was hugely influential not in Britain but in Germany, With the notable exception of Major-General J. F. C. Fuller,* senior British commanders like Field Marshal Earl Haig simply refused to accept that ‘the aeroplane, the tank [and] the motor car [would] supersede the horse in future wars’, dismissing motorized weapons as mere ‘accessories to the man and horse’. Haig’s brother concurred: the cavalry would ‘never be scrapped to make room for the tanks’. By contrast, younger German officers immediately grasped the significance of Liddell Hart’s work. Among his most avid fans was Heinz Guderian, commander of the 19th German Army Corps in the invasion of Poland. As Guderian recalled, it was from Liddell Hart and other British pioneers of ‘a new type of warfare on the largest scale’ that he learned the importance of ‘the concentration of armour’. Moreover,

it was Liddell Hart who emphasized the use of armoured forces for long-range strokes, operations against the opposing army’s communications, and [who] also proposed a type of armoured division combining panzer and panzer-infantry units. Deeply impressed by these ideas, I tried to develop them in a sense practicable for our own army … I owe many suggestions of our further development to Captain Liddell Hart.

Guderian – who was happy to describe himself as Liddell Hart’s disciple and pupil and even translated his works into German – had learned his lessons well. In September 1939 his panzers were unstoppable. The Poles did not, as legend has it, attempt cavalry charges against them, though mounted troops were deployed against German infantry, but they lacked adequate motor transport and their tanks were fewer and technically inferior to the Germans’. Moreover, like the Czechs before them, the Poles found Anglo-French guarantees to be militarily worthless. At the Battle of Bzura they mounted a desperate counteroffensive to hold up the German assault on Warsaw, but by September 16 their resistance was crumbling. By the 17th the Germans had reached the fortress at Bresc (Brest) on the River Bug. On September 28 Warsaw itself fell. Eight days later the last Polish troops laid down their arms. The entire campaign had lasted barely five weeks.

The Poles had fought courageously, but they were outnumbered and outgunned. The most striking thing about the war in the West the following year was that the opposite was true. It was perhaps predictable that the Dutch and Belgians would succumb to superior German forces, but the fall of France within a matter of just six weeks was, as the historian Marc Bloch said, a ‘strange defeat’. Even without the support of the British Expeditionary Force, the French forces were superior on paper, an advantage that ought to have been magnified by their fighting a defensive campaign.

* Fuller had been the mastermind behind the British tank offensive at Cambrai in 1917. His frustration with the British Establishment led him to support Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists.

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by | 18 May 2009 · 5:44 pm

Sudetenland, Ireland, and Rand Uitlanders

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 346-347:

The term Sudetenland was not much used before the 1930s. At the end of the First World War an attempt had been made to associate the predominantly Germanophone periphery of Bohemia and Moravia with the new post-imperial Austria by constituting Sudetenland as a new Austrian province, but this had come to nothing. The Germans who found themselves under Czechoslovakian rule after the First World War – they accounted for over a fifth of the population, not counting the mainly German-speaking Jews – had at no time been citizens of the Reich of which Hitler was Chancellor. They were first and foremost Bohemians. The role of Bohemia in the evolution of National Socialism had nevertheless been seminal. It had been there that, before the First World War, German workers for the first time defined themselves as both nationalists and socialists in response to mounting competition from Czech migrants from the countryside. It had been in Bohemia that some of the most bitter political battles in the history of inter-war Czechoslovakia had been fought, over issues like language and education. The industrial regions where German settlement was concentrated were hard hit by the Depression; Germans were over-represented among the unemployed, just as they were under-represented in government employment. On the other hand, Czechoslovakia was unusual in Central and Eastern Europe. It was the only one of the ‘successor states’ that had arisen from the ruins of the Habsburg Empire that was still a democracy in 1938. It also occupied a strategically vital position as a kind of wedge jutting into Germany, dividing Saxony and Silesia from Austria. Its politics and its location made Czechoslovakia the pivot around which inter-war Europe turned.

The first and greatest weakness of Chamberlain’s foreign policy was that by accepting the legitimacy of ‘self-determination’ for the Sudeten Germans, it implicitly accepted the legitimacy of Hitler’s goal of a Greater Germany. Chamberlain’s aim was not to prevent the transfer of the Sudeten Germans and their lands to Germany, but merely to prevent Hitler’s achieving it by force.* ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t say to Germany,’ so Chamberlain reasoned, ‘give us satisfactory assurances that you won’t use force to deal with the Austrians and Czecho-Slovakians and we will give you similar assurances that we won’t use force to prevent the changes you want if you can get them by peaceful means.’ His comparison with the English settlers in the Transvaal on the eve of the Boer War said it all; Chamberlain did not mean to imply that a war was likely, but that the German demands for the Sudetenlanders were as legitimate as his father’s had been for the Uitlanders. To use a different analogy, it had taken generations for British Conservatives to reconcile themselves to the idea of Home Rule for the Irish; they conceded the Sudeten Germans’ right to it in a trice. Since Versailles, Germany had been aggrieved. The transfer of the Sudetenland was intended to redress her grievances in what Chamberlain hoped would be a full and final settlement.

* The ‘Uitlanders’ (Afrikaans for ‘foreigners’) were the British settlers who had been drawn to the Transvaal by the discovery of gold. They were treated by the Boers as aliens, furnishing the British government with a pretext for intervention in the region. Joseph Chamberlain, the arch-enemy of Home Rule for Ireland, demanded ‘Home Rule for the Rand’, meaning that the Uitlanders should be granted the vote after five years’ residence.

POSTSCRIPT, pp. 367-368:

What was more, Hitler gained immediately from Munich. With Czechoslovakia emasculated, Germany’s eastern frontier was significantly less vulnerable. Moreover, in occupying the Sudetenland, the Germans acquired at a stroke 1.5 million rifles, 750 aircraft, 600 tanks and 2,000 field guns, all of which were to prove useful in the months to come. Indeed, more than one in ten of the tanks used by the Germans in their Western offensive of 1940 were Czech-built. The industrial resources of Western Bohemia further strengthened Germany’s war machine, just as the Anschluss had significantly added to Germany’s supplies of labour, hard currency and steel. As Churchill put it, the belief that ‘security can be obtained by throwing a small state to the wolves’ was ‘a fatal delusion’: ‘The war potential of Germany will increase in a short time more rapidly than it will be possible for France and Great Britain to complete the measures necessary for their defence.’ ‘Buying time’ at Munich in fact meant widening, not narrowing, the gap that Britain and France desperately needed to close. To put it another way: it would prove much harder to fight Germany in 1939 than it would have proved in 1938.

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Filed under Austria, Bohemia, Britain, democracy, economics, Germany, Ireland, nationalism, South Africa, war

by | 13 May 2009 · 6:13 am

Ferguson on the Origins of World War II

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 312-314:

For obvious reasons, we tend to think of the years from 1933 to 1939 in terms of the origins of the Second World War. The question we customarily ask is whether or not the Western powers could have done more to avert the war – whether or not the policy of appeasement towards Germany and Japan was a disastrous blunder. Yet this may be to reverse the order of events. Appeasement did not lead to war. It was war that led to appeasement. For the war did not begin, as we tend to think, in Poland in 1939. It began in Asia in 1937, if not in 1931, when Japan invaded Manchuria. It began in Africa in 1935, when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia. It began in Western Europe in 1936, when Germany and Italy began helping Franco win the Spanish Civil War. It began in Eastern Europe in April 1939, with the Italian invasion of Albania. Contrary to the myth propagated by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that he and his confederates were its only begetter, Hitler was a latecomer to the war. He achieved his foreign policy objectives prior to September 1939 without firing a shot. Nor was it his intention to start a world war at that date. The war that broke out then between Germany, France and Britain was nearly as much the fault of the Western powers, and indeed of Poland, as of Hitler, as A. J. P. Taylor contended forty-five years ago in The Origins of the Second World War.

Yet Taylor’s argument was at best only half-right. He was right about the Western powers: the pusillanimity of the French statesmen, who were defeated in their hearts before a shot had been fired; the hypocrisy of the Americans, with their highfaluting rhetoric and low commercial motives; above all, the muddle-headedness of the British. The British said they wanted to uphold the authority of the League of Nations and the rights of small and weak nations; but when push came to shove in Manchuria, Abyssinia and Czechoslovakia, imperial self-interest trumped collective security. They fretted about arms limitation, as though an equality of military capability would suffice to avoid war; but while a military balance might secure the British Isles, it offered no effective security for either Britain’s continental allies or her Asian possessions. With withering irony, Taylor called the Munich agreement a ‘triumph for British policy [and] … for all that was best and most enlightened in British life’. In reality, war with Germany was averted at the price of an unfulfillable guarantee to the rump Czechoslovakia. If handing the Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938 had been the right decision, why then did the British not hand him Danzig, to which he had in any case a stronger claim, in 1939? The answer was that by then they had given another militarily worthless guarantee, to the Poles. Having done so, they failed to grasp what Churchill saw at once: that without a ‘grand alliance’ with the Soviet Union, Britain and France might find themselves facing Germany alone. As an indictment of British diplomacy, Taylor’s has stood up remarkably well to subsequent scholarship – though it must be said that he offers few clues as to why Britain’s statesmen were so incompetent.

Where Taylor erred profoundly was when he sought to liken Hitler’s foreign policy to ‘that of his predecessors, of the professional diplomats at the foreign ministry, and indeed of virtually all Germans’, and when he argued that the Second World War was ‘a repeat performance of the First’. Nothing could be more remote from the truth. Bismarck had striven mightily to prevent the creation of a Greater Germany encompassing Austria. Yet this was one of Hitler’s stated objectives, albeit one that he had inherited from the Weimar Republic. Bismarck’s principal nightmare had been one of coalitions between the other great powers directed against Germany. Hitler quite deliberately created such an encircling coalition when he invaded the Soviet Union before Britain had been defeated. Not even the Kaiser had been so rash; indeed, he had hoped he could avoid war with Britain. Bismarck had used colonial policy as a tool to maintain the balance of power in Europe; the Kaiser had craved colonies. Hitler was uninterested in overseas acquisitions even as bargaining counters. Throughout the 1920s Germany was consistently hostile to Poland and friendly to the Soviet Union. Hitler reversed these positions within little more than a year of coming to power. It is true, as Taylor contended, that Hitler improvised his way through the diplomatic crises of the mid-1930s with a combination of intuition and luck. He admitted that he was a gambler with a low aversion to risk (‘All my life I have played va banque’). But what was he gambling to win? This is not a difficult question to answer, because he answered it repeatedly. He was not content, like Stresemann or Brüning, merely to dismantle the Versailles Treaty – a task that the Depression had half-done for him even before he became Chancellor. Nor was his ambition to restore Germany to her position in 1914. It is not even correct, as the German historian Fritz Fischer suggested, that Hitler’s aims were similar to those of Germany’s leaders during the First World War, namely to carve out an East European sphere of influence at the expense of Russia.

Hitler’s goal was different. Simply stated, it was to enlarge the German Reich so that it embraced as far as possible the entire German Volk and in the process to annihilate what he saw as the principal threats to its existence, namely the Jews and Soviet Communism (which to Hitler were one and the same). Like Japan’s proponents of territorial expansion, he sought living space in the belief that Germany required more territory because of her over-endowment with people and her under-endowment with strategic raw materials.

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Filed under Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, nationalism, Poland, U.S., USSR, war

by | 5 May 2009 · 8:18 pm

Begam Samrū: A Most Unusual Ruler

My historian brother has been doing a lot of research on Mercenaries and Military Manpower in world history. He’s started a blog on the topic, but has been too busy with other projects (and too fond of footnotes) to post much yet. When I stumble across new sources that might interest him (like my previous two blogposts), I let him know. Here’s one I came across in an unlikely source, the venerable Archives of Asian Art, which has finally made its debut in JSTOR. Of course, he had already heard of the central figure, but the Wikipedia entry for her is so long-winded, poorly written, and poorly documented that I thought I would post her biography as presented by UC Berkeley art historian Alka Hingorani, in her article entitled “Artful Agency: Imagining and Imaging Begam Samrū” in Archives of Asian Art LIII(2002-2003):54-70.

Begam Samrū was born Farzānā, in 1750/51 C.E., to an impoverished Arab nobleman who died when she was still very young. Events and circumstances led her and her mother to Delhi, battle-weary in the mid-eighteenth century. They arrived about 1760 C.E., and from all accounts her early years in Delhi were spent at a courtesan’s home, where she reputedly grew into an exceptionally beautiful and talented woman. The second half of the eighteenth century in Delhi has been referred to as “gardi ka waqt,” or the “time of troubles.” Nādir Shāh of Persia and Ahmad Shah Abdālī of Afghanistan had mauled the Mughal Empire and the Maratha Confederacy, and by the 1760s Delhi was licking its wounds. A substantial indigenous resurgence seemed unlikely. The Jats were baiting the Marathas, and the British were trying to keep both in check. Several smaller powers were beginning to elbow for space as the larger ones lost control of the north Indian region. Increasingly, the Mughals, Marathas, and British were finding it necessary to share power with chiefdoms. In this widening field the smaller contestants whose military means were inadequate to their ambitions often had to resort to foreign military adventurers.

General Walter Reinhardt, Austrian mercenary and free lance, was one such adventurer. Having variously served the British, the French, and the Jats, he was desperately seeking employment in the Mughal court, since his last service to the French had left the British hot in his pursuit. With four battalions and a few cannons at his disposal, he was offering his services to the nearest employer of ample purse and sufficient political clout to afford protection against the British: a fairly typical scenario for the time. While in Delhi he apparently took a fancy to Farzānā, who became his concubine, or begam, as she chose to style herself. Their association appears to have been intense, both personally and politically, and lasted until his death in 1778. By this time “Le Sombre,” the sobriquet conferred upon the saturnine Reinhardt by earlier associates, had become Indianized to “Samrū.” Upon his death Samrū ki begam, “the wife of Samrū,” took his sobriquet as her name and began to be called Begam Samrū. This slippage of identity, made possible by her intimate association with Reinhardt, was facilitated by their obvious close military and political partnership. At the court of the Mughal emperor, Shāh Ālam, she had taken active part—directly and indirectly—in the maneuvering for power, in order to benefit her “husband.” They had shared years in camp as he led his forces against the Marathas and other powers, and she was his ally—a brave soldier and a crafty strategist—as much as his mate. Begam Samrū also enjoyed enormous favor at Shāh Ālam’s court for another critical reason: on several occasions in the 1780s she had acted to save his life, often at some risk to her own. On one occasion she secured his release from Ghulām Qādir, the Rohilla chief, who had gained control of the palace and had imprisoned and tortured the old emperor. Another rescue took place when the blind and enfeebled emperor, who had joined the battlefield himself to bring a rebellious vassal to heel, was almost defeated due to indiscipline amongst his own forces. General laxity and indiscipline in the imperial army had endangered the emperor’s life more than once, and Begam Samrū had repeatedly brought her troops and artillery to his rescue. Considering these heroic benefactions, even though Walter Reinhardt had left a grown son—Zafaryāb Khan—by another Muslim woman, Begam Samrū’s position as heir to his authority was never in serious jeopardy.

Her ascendancy was aided by Zafaryāb Khan s own reputation as a man of weak intellect. He was so little regard ed that his father s troops did not recognize him even as a nominal chief, pledging their allegiance to Begam Samrū instead. The Begam came into her own at this point. She swore continued allegiance to the Mughal emperor, who conferred upon her in return the principality of Sardhanā, slightly northeast of Delhi. This was a jāgīr (“principality”) of small villages, which yielded substantial revenue. It was, from all accounts, very tightly controlled by the Begam, whose presence enhanced its political importance. William Francklin (1763–1839) paid handsome tribute to the Begam’s administrative acumen in his writings in the 1790s, when she had held her jāgīr for about fifteen years:

An unremitting attention to the cultivation of the lands, a mild and upright administration, and care for the welfare of the inhabitants, has enabled this small tract to yield a revenue of ten lakhs of rupees per annum (up from six)…. A fort near the town contains a good arsenal and foundry for cannon. Five battalions of disciplined sepoys, commanded by Europeans of different countries…and about 40 pieces of cannon of various calibres, constitute the force kept up by the Begam Samrū. With these and about 200 Europeans, principally employed in the service of artillery, she is enabled to maintain a respectable position among the neighbouring powers.

As John Lall also asserts, “It was a remarkable achievement for a single woman, more than ten years after Najāf Khān’s (her protector’s) death when Shāh Ālam was being blown like a weathercock with every change in the precarious balance of factional power. To be useful to him, she had to be capable not just of maintaining herself in power but also of intervening effectively in the affairs of the time.” In her long career she overcame many adversities, including a near-revolt among her troops brought about by her second, secret marriage to a Frenchman, an insurrection provoked by her stepson, imprisonment from which she was rescued by an old lover, and the vicissitudes of endlessly shifting political alliances with their attendant suspicion and deceits. Along the way she converted to Roman Catholicism, joined hands with the Marathas, then with the French, and finally in 1805 forged an alliance with the British, a little after it became clear that the Sikhs under Ranjīt Singh would not prevail against English might. Her reliance on the Sikhs for longer than politically warranted was one of her few miscalculations, but even from that she recovered quickly enough. Fortuitous and timely changes in power hierarchies often worked to her advantage, but largely it was her personal charisma, military prowess, administrative and political acumen, her generosity and her loyalty no less than her reputed ruthlessness, her guile and cunning, that allowed Begam Samrū to rule more or less absolutely and “brilliantly” (a word that all her biographers have used) over her small principality.Yet her life was altogether more interesting, I think, than even the events of history that made it possible. She died in 1836, at the age of eighty-five. She left behind no personal chronicles: neither auto biography nor personal correspondence to augment and correct a history told by others. But a few paintings remain, as windows into a life lived fully by any account.

They certainly don’t make them like that anymore, male or female.

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Filed under biography, Britain, India, military, Pakistan, religion

by | 13 April 2009 · 9:37 pm

Commissar Trotsky’s Military Tactics

From The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin Press, 2006), pp. 145-148:

Between May and June [1918], the Czechs swept eastwards, capturing Novo-Nikolaevsk, Penza, Syzran, Tomsk, Omsk, Samara and finally Vladivostok. Meanwhile, Russia’s former allies sent expeditionary forces, whose primary aim was to keep Russia in the war. The British landed troops at Archangel and Murmansk, as well as at Vladivostok; the French sent men to Odessa, the Americans to Vladivostok. The Allies also supplied the White armies with weapons and other supplies. The Japanese seized the opportunity to march across the Amur River from Manchuria. Meanwhile, the cities that were supposed to be the headquarters of the Revolution emptied as factories closed and supplies of food and fuel dried up. When Denikin called on all the White forces to converge on Moscow in July 1918, it seemed more than likely that the Bolshevik regime would be overthrown.

On August 6, 1918, White forces in combination with the renegade Czech Legion captured Kazan. The Bolshevik 5th Army was haemorrhaging deserters. Ufa had fallen; so too had Simbirsk, Lenin’s own birthplace. Another step back along the Volga would bring the forces of counter-revolution to the gates of Nizhny-Novgorod, opening the road to Moscow. Having resigned his post as Commissar for Foreign Affairs in favour of Military Affairs, Trotsky now had the daunting task of stiffening the Red Army’s resolve. He was, as we have seen, by training a journalist not a general. Yet the goatee-bearded intellectual with his pince-nez had seen enough of war in the Balkans and on the Western Front to know that without discipline an army was doomed. It was Trotsky who insisted on the need for conscription, realizing that volunteers would not suffice. It was Trotsky who brought in the former Tsarist NCOs and officers – many of them hitherto languishing in jail – whose experience was to be vital in taking on the Whites.

Trotsky had two advantages. Firstly, the Bolsheviks controlled the central railway hubs, from which he could deploy forces at speed. Indeed, it was from his own specially designed armoured railway carriage that he himself directed operations, travelling some 100,000 miles in the course of the war. Secondly, though the Bolsheviks lacked experience of war, they did have experience of terrorism; like the Serbian nationalists, they too had employed assassination as a tactic in the pre-war years. It was to terror, in the name of martial law, that Trotsky now turned.

When he arrived at Kazan, the first thing he did was to uncouple the engine from his train; a signal to his troops that he had no intention of retreating. He then brought twenty-seven deserters to nearby Syvashsk, on the banks of the Volga, and had them shot. The only way to ensure that Red Army recruits did not desert or run away, Trotsky had concluded, was to mount machine-guns in their rear and shoot any who failed to advance against the enemy. This was the choice he offered: possible death in the front or certain death in the rear. ‘We must put an end once and for all’, he sneered with a characteristically caustic turn of phrase, ‘to the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life.’ Units that refused to fight were to be decimated. It was a turning point in the Russian civil war – and an ominous sign of how the Bolsheviks would behave if they won it. In the bitter fighting for the bridge over the Volga at Kazan, Trotsky’s tactics made that outcome significantly more likely. The bridge was saved, and on September 10 the city itself was retaken. Two days later Simbirsk also fell to the Reds. The White advance faltered as they found themselves challenged not only by a rapidly growing Red Army, but also by recalcitrant Ukrainians and Chechens to their rear. The Czechs were weary of fighting; the Legion disintegrated as it was driven back to Samara and then beyond the Urals…. By the end of November Denikin had lost Voronezh and Kastornoe.

The end of the war on the Western Front was well timed for the Bolsheviks. It undermined the legitimacy of the foreign powers’ intervention, especially as they now had left-wing outbreaks of their own to deal with. Only the Japanese showed any inclination to maintain an armed presence on Russian soil, and they were content to stake out new territorial claims in the Far East and leave the rest of Russia to its fate.

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Filed under Britain, Czechia, France, Japan, Slovakia, U.S., USSR, war

by | 13 February 2009 · 6:32 pm

Modernizing Music under Meiji

From “Cultural Change in Nineteenth-Century Japan,” by Marius B. Jansen, in Challenging Past and Present: The Metamorphosis of Nineteenth-Century Japanese Art, ed. by Ellen P. Conant (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 44-45:

Gagaku gained increased prominence, but at the cost of stultification. By the end of the Tokugawa period it was associated primarily with the imperial court; professionals performed at court and the larger Shinto shrines. In 1871 a Gagaku Bureau was established within the Imperial Household Office (later Imperial Household Ministry), and thereafter its representatives served on all commissions charged with musical policy. Gagaku practice became archaized and codified in the process of defining as a “tradition” what must at one time have been considerably more varied. Nagauta, which had deep roots in popular culture, flourished. It gradually became more independent from the kabuki theater, developing a concert format and spread into commoner homes as an amateur skill. Instrumental music was freed from special restrictions. Koto had been a special art reserved for blind performers, while shakuhachi had been associated with Fuke Buddhism, which was banned in 1871. Both skills became middle-class accomplishments. Satsuma and Choshu biwa music, previously considered provincial, now acquired a popularity corollary to the political dominance of those southwestern domains in the new regime. Small wonder that former Tokugawa retainers often sneered at their Meiji successors as imo (potato) zamurai.

Western music had made its entry in Bakumatsu times, sometimes under unlikely circumstances. The captain’s clerk aboard Commodore Perry’s Saratoga wrote that Japanese guests who were treated to a band concert in 1854 courteously asked to hear the first number again, but proved to mean the tuning-up period, whose sounds they found more interesting than the marches that followed. Satsuma samurai were sufficiently impressed by the martial strains that came to shore from the British band celebrating the bombardment that had just burned Kagoshima in 1863 to want to introduce Western military music into their own forces. An English bandmaster of the marine battalion guarding the Yokohama legation was asked to instruct thirty Satsuma militiamen, and in 1871 these formed the core of the new navy band, its English bandmaster’s salary shared by the navy and the Gagaku Bureau. In 1877 the Englishman Fenton was replaced by a German, Franz Eckert. The harmonization and orchestration of “Kimi ga yo,” which came to function as the new national anthem, was the product of the combined efforts of these bandmasters.

Military songs and marches quickly became popular. “Oh My Prince!” (Miyasan! Miyasan!) was ascribed to the armies that marched against the shogun’s capital. Words could be changed to fit new themes and occasions. “Battōtai” (The Drawn Sword Unit), composed in 1885 by a French instructor about the Satsuma Rebellion, became “The Sinking of the Normanton” in 1887 for the disaster off Kii in which all the Japanese, and no foreigners, were lost, and emerged again as the “Rappa-bushi” of the Russo-Japanese War. Still other songs adapted the melodies of Stephen Collins Foster to a Japanese mode, as with “Tobe Tobe Tonbi Sora” (Fly, Kite, Fly, High in the Sky!), whose tune turns out to be a version of “Way Down upon the Sewanee River.”

Appropriately enough, some of the last strains of late-Edo chant and song were suppressed with the people’s rights movement, which adapted them to political uses. Dainamaito bushi, satirical pieces designed to be explosive, were composed, sung, and sold by street-singer activists deploring official arrogance and government tyranny in the 1880s. The victories of the state in domestic politics and foreign wars, however, speeded the production of a new and less divisive national culture, homogenized by mass education and literacy, which emerged by the end of the century.

The Ministry of Stultification (or Zombification) would certainly be an appropriate name for the Imperial Household Ministry, even today.

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by | 13 December 2008 · 8:24 pm

“One Million Dead”: Just a Number

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 273-275:

“ONE MILLION DEAD”: This is the most convenient number to have come out of the wildly varying estimates of how many people may have been killed following partition. Mountbatten preferred the lowest available estimate, which was two hundred thousand, and has been widely condemned for it; the denial of holocausts is always a sticky business, and yet more so when one may be implicated personally. Indian estimates have ranged as high as two million. Many historians have settled for a figure of somewhere between half a million and a million. The figure of one million dead has now been repeated so often that it is accepted as historical fact. “What is the basis for this acceptance?” asked the historian Gyanendra Pandey. “That it appears like something of a median?” Unfortunately so, for the truth is that no one knows how many people were killed, nor how many were raped, mutilated or traumatized. The numbers anyone chooses say more about their political inclination than about the facts. Fewer than four hundred thousand suggests an apologia for British rule; four hundred thousand to one million moderation; a million or more usually indicates that the person intends to blame the deaths on a specific party, the most usual culprits being one or more of Mountbatten, Patel, Jinnah or the Sikhs.

Beyond the dead, there were more numbers, too, plucked from the extrapolations and imaginations of regional officials, army, police and historians. Refugees on the move by the beginning of September: five hundred thousand, or perhaps one million. Women abducted and raped: 75,000, or perhaps 125,000. Total who would migrate from one dominion to the other between 1947 and 1948: ten million, or perhaps twelve million, or perhaps fifteen million. The Indian National Archives contain sheaves of charts scribbled by British and Indian officials, recording eighty-seven killed in Bengal here, forty-three injured in Madras there. “The figures make no pretence to accuracy,” admitted the Home Department. The Punjab government reported that its casualty estimates were “increasing daily as investigation uncovers further tragedies”; the North-West Frontier Province government referred to “stray murders,” which were not counted! Usually it was impossible to count the number of victims amid the “confused heap of rubble & corpses” that was left behind after riots. Sir Francis Mudie, governor of the West Punjab, remembered, “[I had to] ignore any report of a riot unless it alleged that there were at least a thousand dead. If there were, I asked for a further report, but I cannot remember any case in which I was able to do anything.”

In Stalin’s famous words, one death is a tragedy; one million deaths is a statistic. In this case, it is not even a particularly good statistic. The very incomprehensibility of what a million horrible and violent deaths might mean, and the impossibility of producing an appropriate response, is perhaps the reason that the events following partition have yielded such a great and moving body of fictional literature and such an inadequate and flimsy factual history. What does it matter to the readers of history. today whether there were two hundred thousand deaths, or a million, or two million? On that scale, is it possible to feel proportional revulsion, to be five times more upset at a million deaths than at two hundred thousand? Few can grasp the awfulness of how it might feel to have their fathers barricaded in their houses and burned alive, their mothers beaten and thrown off speeding trains, their daughters torn away, raped and branded, their sons held down in full view, screaming and pleading, while a mob armed with rough knives hacked off their hands and feet. All these things happened, and many more like them; not just once but perhaps a million times. It is not possible to feel sufficient emotion to appreciate this monstrous savagery and suffering. That is the true horror of the events in the Punjab in 1947: one of the vilest episodes in the whole of history, a devastating illustration of the worst excesses to which human beings can succumb. The death toll is just a number.

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by | 11 December 2008 · 2:00 pm

British India’s Problem of 565 Princely States

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 221-225:

Each of the 565 princely states in India had a separate agreement with the government, ensuring the paramountcy of the British Crown over its affairs. It had taken centuries to bring the states under paramountcy, and many still operated through arcane systems of government and society. It was the boast of the empire’s supporters that the reassuring eminence of the Indian civil service, staffed almost entirely with public-school-educated British men, kept things on track. Some thought this the pinnacle of British achievement, allowing the states their freedom of cultural diversity while tempering the worst excesses of absolute rule. The idea was to leave rulers as independent as possible; in case of trouble, for the British to offer the ruler in question “private counsel”; and, should that not fix the trouble, to intervene. In the event of gross totalitarianism or outright rebellion, the British raj would remove the individual prince who had proved to be a bad egg, install a more responsible scion of his family and leave the dynasty intact.

Unfortunately, this appealing portrait of a smooth, tolerant and accountable system was a fiction. In reality, the British presence in India was relatively small and unable to keep watch over so many princes. The notion that the “British race” had a monopoly on freedom and democracy was unsupportable with regard to the lengthy traditions of public debate, heterogeneous government and freedom of conscience that had existed for centuries in the Indias of Asoka and Akbar. If anything, the presence of the British damaged these traditions and actually safeguarded the princes from any new incursion of democracy. The British army was always on hand to give succor to each imperiled tyrant and stamp out any attempts by the people to express their discontent. As one staunch imperialist boasted, the princes had been “mostly rescued from imminent destruction by British protection.” And so imperialists were able to perfect a classic piece of doublethink: railing against what they called “Oriental despotism” on one hand, while propping it up with the other.

Even the illiberal Lord Curzon had been appalled by the standard of princely behavior during his viceroyalty, half a century before. he had written to Queen Victoria: “For all these failures we are responsible. We have allowed the chiefs when young to fall into bad hands. We have condoned their extravagances, we have worked at their vices.” … “As Your Majesty knows,” he added, “the Maharaja Holkar is half mad and is addicted to horrible vices.” This last was a particularly pointed comment—Victoria liked Holkar, because he had once sent her a telegram on her birthday—though “half mad” underestimated his insanity by around 50 percent. He would stand at a high window overlooking his subjects and issue random edicts as they popped into his head, once ordering the abduction of every man wearing a black coat. Once, he harnessed the bankers of Indore to a state coach and whipped them soundly as he drove them around the city.

During his tour of India in 1921, the young Dickie Mountbatten had admired the princely states but was shocked by their inequality. In Udaipur, he wondered at the habit of feeding pigs when people were starving, an injustice that prompted him to note, “There are times when I do sympathize with the Bolsheviks.” Princely excesses were common in states where the vast majority of people were destitute. The Jam Sahib of Nawanagar had 157 cars and a wife with 1,700 saris. The Nawab of Junagadh spent twenty-one thousand pounds on a wedding for two of his dogs. The Maharaja of Patiala moved into London’s Savoy Hotel, occupying all thirty-five suites on the fifth floor, and ordered that three thousand fresh roses be brought to decorate his rooms every day. Visitors to the miserly Nizam of Hyderabad would have seen that he used what looked like a crumpled ball of old newspaper as a paperweight—little suspecting that wrapped in it was the 185-carat Jacob Diamond, twice the size of the Koh-i-Noor. The Gaekwar of Baroda’s second wife, Sita Devi, earned herself the nickname “India’s Wallis Simpson” when she plundered the state treasury to finance her jewelry habit. Sita Devi made away to Switzerland with untold riches, including the incomparable Baroda pearl carpet. This remarkable object measured six feet by seven and a half feet, and was made up of 1.4 million pearls, 2,520 rose-cut diamonds and hundreds of emeralds and rubies, embroidered onto deerskin and silk in delicate arabesques….

These are some of the grosser examples of princely behavior and should not be taken as a slander against every individual prince. Some among them were men and women of great intelligence, ability and compassion. A Gaekwar of Baroda introduced the first free, compulsory education in India in 1894. A Maharaja of Travancore introduced progressive land reforms in the early 1880s. One turn-of-the-century Maharaja of Cochin was greatly admired for his modernizing legal reforms—though he became so frustrated at the complacency of his British patrons that he abdicated in 1914. But the existence of a few commendable examples does not vindicate the system. The reason that the Indian princely states were uniquely badly ruled was the very fact of British protection. Aside from their consciences, the princes had no incentive to govern well. Foreign invaders would be dealt with, domestic challenges neutered and the ravening mob readily suppressed, all by the might of the British Indian army.

UPDATE: The blogger at Blood & Treasure comments that this sounds like “a sort of best case scenario for Afghanistan”!

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by | 4 December 2008 · 12:01 pm

British India’s Rising Religious Separatism

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 236-238:

Despite his preoccupation with trivialities, even Mountbatten could not ignore the fierce controversies thrown up by the two partitions of Bengal and the Punjab. For centuries, both regions had been melting pots of cultures, a jumbled variety of Muslims and Hindus living side by side, with Sikhs, Buddhists, Animists and Christians fitted in too. In times of peace, it had not mattered much to which of these religions a Punjabi or a Bengali adhered. As Jinnah himself had admitted, most people within the regions tended to consider their local identity before their religious affiliation. But the importance of religious identity had been growing in the twentieth century, notably in India and more slowly in the world beyond it.

The reason for this effect can in part be traced to the British policy of “divide and rule.” Undoubtedly, the raj did plenty to encourage identity politics. The British found it easier to understand their vast domain if they broke it down into manageable chunks, and by the 1930s they had become anxious to ensure that each chunk was given a full and fair hearing. But picking a few random unelected lobbyists, based on what the British thought was a cross-section of Indian varieties, was not a reliable way to represent 400 million people. India’s population could not be divided into neat boxes labeled by religion and cross- referenced with social position. India was an amorphous mass of different cultures, lifestyles, traditions and beliefs. After so many centuries of integration and exchange, these were not distinct, but rippled into each other, creating a web of cultural hybrids and compromises. A Sunni Muslim from the Punjab might have more in common with a Sikh than he did with a Shia Muslim from Bengal; a Shia might regard a Sufi Muslim as a heretic; a Sufi might get on better with a Brahmin Hindu than with a Wahhabi Muslim; a Brahmin might feel more at ease with a European than he would with another Hindu who was an outcaste. When the British started to define “communities” based on religious identity and attach political representation to them, many Indians stopped accepting the diversity of their own thoughts and began to ask themselves in which of the boxes they belonged. At the same time, Indian politicians began to focus on religion as a central part of their policies—defining themselves by what they were, and even more by what they were not.

This phenomenon is shown at its clearest with Jinnah, who began his career as the leading light of Hindu-Muslim unity, and ended it by forcing the creation of a separate Islamic-majority state. But the arc of Jinnah’s career merely amplifies that of Indian politics as a whole. Congress was a largely secular and inclusive organization during Motilal Nehru‘s prime in the first twenty years of the twentieth century. Though it was the opposite of his intention, the emergence of Gandhi gave confidence to religious chauvinists. While Gandhi himself welcomed those of all faiths, the very fact that he brought spiritual sensibilities to the center of politics stirred up extreme and divisive passions. Fundamentalist Hindus were rare presences on the political scene before Gandhi. In the wake of Gandhi, though, Hindu nationalists were able to move into the central ground of politics; while organizations like the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), dedicated to the formation of a Hindu nation, swelled their ranks from the fringes. This was no slow, invisible political trend; it was happening visibly during the spring and summer of 1947, when holy sadhus clad in saffron robes marched around the streets of Delhi, bellowing forth political slogans. Rajendra Prasad, who was to become the president of the new Constituent Assembly, wrote to Nehru on 7 August telling him that since July he had received 164,000 letters and postcards demanding that cow slaughter be made illegal—a common concern of devout Hindus, but one which is often used and taken as an anti-Muslim strategy. It was the Muslims in India, and the Untouchables, who ran the lucrative leather and beef industries, mostly for export. The threat of a ban on cow slaughter naturally drove Muslims and Untouchables into the arms of more radical political organizations, which they felt would stick up for them. Whether the British caused division by carving up politics on the basis of religion, or whether they were simply responding to a trend in Indian society for Hindu nationalism and the beginnings of an Islamic resurgence, is an endlessly debatable question.

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