History Archives - Martin's Booklog

Medieval Military Technology — Kelly DeVries & Robert Douglas Smith

Published on July 2, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Medieval Military Technology

Medieval Military Technology
Kelly DeVries & Robert Douglas Smith
356 pages including notes and index
published in 2013

Medieval Military Technology is an attempt to provide an overview of all aspects of Medieval weaponry and other technology in one book, as you might’ve suspected from the title. When this was originally published it was the first of its kind for the Middle Ages; this is the second edition. Trying to cover such a huge period like this is rather a challenge of course and that this books tries to cover all aspects of warfare means it can’t really go into too much detail on each individual aspect. Nevertheless an single volume overview like this was exactly what I was looking for, having gotten interested in the topic through watching too many medievaloid fantasy anime…

To be honest, this was a bit of a disappointment. DeVries and Smith turned out to be not very engaging as writers and the end result was a much more stodgy book than it could’ve been. Medieval Military Technology methodologically goes through first personal weaponry and armour, followed by siege weapons, fortifications and finally warships. Each separate part starts with an introduction that tries to sum of the history of its subject up to the Early Middle Ages before going into more detail in separate chapters on its various sub topics. Especially in the first part of the book this approach, detailing each and every possible Medieval weapon and bit of armour, is a bit dry. This is not helped by a lack of illustrations. A few more technical drawings, especially for all the various armour types would have been appreciated. The same lack of illustrations also hamper the other parts, but on the whole I found those to be easier to follow and less dull.

What I found also lacking was how all this technology was used in practise, how it evolved tactically and strategically, how the various bits worked together. Again, the first part is the worst for this because it has so many diverse types of weapons and armour to handle, few of which get more than a few pages to themselves. The only time when the impact of a specific technology is discussed is in chapter 3, about the invention of the stirrup and how it made mounted shock combat possible. Without a stirrup a knight could not brace himself for the shock of running somebody through with his spear or lance; with it he could. This invention arguably led to the invention of feudalism, as rulers had to depend on subjects rich enough to be able to afford to keep horses, therefore needing to grant them lands to be able to do so. DeVries and Smith go into detail on the merits of this thesis, summarising the arguments of supporters and opponents. It’s a strangely argumentative chapter in what’s otherwise a more encyclopedic work.

On the whole then, this was a decent enough overview but it’s not good enough for me to buy a copy for myself. You’d get much of the same value from reading the relevant pages on Wikipedia.

Walcheren to Waterloo — Andrew Limm

Published on July 1, 2024Leave a comment

Cover of Walcheren to Waterloo

Walcheren to Waterloo: The British Army in the Low Countries during the Napoleonic Wars 1793-1815
Andrew Limm
237 pages including notes and index
published in 2018

Back in the nineties, in order to pay my study fees, I used to work the Summers in a chips shop in Veere which was owned by the same people who owned the Campveerse Toren restaurant and hotel, which was the headquarters of the English expeditionary force to Walcheren in 1809. This has little relevance to the actual book to be discussed here, but if I cannot indulge myself in pointless anecdotes in my own booklog, where else? At the very least, this personal history is part of why this title grabbed my eye.

Alliterative as it is, Walcheren to Waterloo is a bit misleading however as Waterloo is barely discussed here, nor does the story start with that failed expedition to Walcheren. Instead, it’s a more general overview of the four different campaigns British forces fought int he Low Countries during the Napoleonic Wars. Those in order being the campaign to occupy Dunkirk in 1793 and the following retreat through the Netherlands in 1795/95, the expedition to Northern Holland in 1799, the aforementioned campaign in Walcheren and finally the failed assault on Bergen Op Zoom in 1813-1814. You’ll note that none of these campaigns were at all successful, all ending in failure and British withdrawal from the Low Countries. This may explain why, as Limm shows in his introduction, these campaigns have received relatively little attention compared to Wellington’s campaigns in Portugal and Spain, let alone Waterloo. For Limm they are a good tool to attack the idea that the British Army had transformed itself between 1798 and 1809, by providing a counterexample to the successful British campaigns of the Peninsular War. As he attempts to show, each campaign, whether it took place before, during or after this supposed transformation, suffered from the same flaws, leading to their ultimate failure. This should not happen if the British Army, smarting from its defeats in the American Revolutionary War and their early interventions in the French Revolutionary Wars, was indeed transformed by the reforms enacting by the Duke of York during this period.

As Limm goes through each campaign in order, it does become clear that the same errors were made over and over again. Each campaign was marred by opportunism, the desire for a quick win overriding any other consideration. Planning for each was abysmal and had to be done in a hurry because each campaign was decided on at the spur of the moment. Intelligence about both the country to be fought in as the enemy forces to fight was always lacking, nor seemed to be a priority for the planners. Because of bad, hurried planning and lack of reliable intelligence, the logistics for each campaign were a shamble as well. The lack of cooperation and coordination between the army and navy, something that is somewhat important for an amphibious operation, did not help here either. The execution of each campaign is not inspiring either, with the nadir being the Walcheren campaign, which saw a large part of the expeditionary force fell ill with the Walcheren flu, which ended up killing thousands. Because clear objectives were lacking due to the rushed planning, each campaign ended up spinning their wheels in search of one. While individual battles were won, strategically each was a failure.

The same pattern repeats time and again. The English manage to land with some difficulty, win their early battles and maybe reach some of the objectives before the lack of planning lets them down. Making the problem worse is the preference each commander seems to have had for over complicating his attack plans, needlessly splitting up his forces instead of concentrating them, as best shown in the campaign in North Holland. There it meant that part of the allied Anglo Russian forces had secured their objectives, but were now too far away to influence of the battles elsewhere, leading to piecemeal defeats there. Though not fatal, these defeats means that the French and Dutch forces opposing them get the space to reorganise and be reinforced, leading to a loss of momentum and ultimately a retreat when the expedition’s nominal goals can no longer be achieved.

That this happened during the early campaigns at Dunkirk and Den Helder is one thing, but that this was repeated at Walcheren and Bergen op Zoom indicates that nothing was learned from these earlier failures even when some of the same people were involved. This is one of Limm’s key points, that the Napoleonic Era British Army did not have any sort of institutional memory nor did its leaders have any desire to examine and learn from those failures. The British also had a nasty habit of blaming their allies for their own failures, as with the Russians in the North Holland campaign. The conclusion he reaches is that it took the exceptional talents and dedication of a Wellington to achieve any semblance of this, but that this was limited to him and his direct staff and commanders. Because it was Wellington driving the campaigns in Spain and at Waterloo they were successful; with any other commander this may not have been the case.

an interesting read if with a slightly misleading title. One thing I did struggle with was that Limm’s command of Dutch geography and place names is not always the greatest. Texel is not a river (it’s an island) and Den Helder is not at the mouth of it. Limm also has a habit of making the armies march in a northern or southern direction when would be more fitting to speak of a easterly or westerly one. It took some getting used to and some squinting at maps to make things clear. It would also have been appreciated if the maps had been located in their respective chapters, rather than clustered in the front of the book. Small quibbles for what was an enlightening look at a military period I knew little about.

Slavernij en Beschaving — Karwan Fatah-Black

Published on April 29, 2024Leave a comment

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Slavernij en Beschaving: Geschiedenis van een Paradox
Slavery and Civilisation: History of a Paradox
Karwan Fatah-Black
192 pages including notes and index
published in 2021

Thanks partially to the Black Lives Matter movement, the slavery debate has erupted once again in the Netherlands. For years and decades those descended from enslaved people have been lobbying for recognition from the Dutch government for the injustices done to their ancestors. While in the past decade both governments and public opinion have been increasingly prepared to indeed acknowledge these, there’s also still a large minority resistant and hostile to any such recognition. Partially this is the usual far right suspects of course, but there are also certain ‘respectable’ historians allergic to anything that looks like an apology for slavery. There is a tendency within the Netherlands to want to have our glorious past as a Great Power without acknowledging the human costs that came with building our empire and wealth. Anything that even hints at the fact that the prosperity of the Netherlands during our Golden Age and beyond was built upon murder, rape, genocide and slavery is immediately rejected. Despite this resistance though the interest in coming to terms with our past has grown, in no small part thanks to the efforts of those whose ancestors were the victims of Dutch greed. Official acknowledgment on all levels of involvement in the slave trade has been growing, with the Dutch government formally apologising for the slave trade not long ago.

Despite this, the question remains why there was and is still so much resistance to this acknowledgement of simple historic facts. Everybody agrees slavery is bad, it has been abolished since 1863, it’s been explicitly named as a crime against humanity by the UN since its foundation, so why this hesitance? That’s the question which led Karwan Fatah-Black to write this book. For him, this resistance flows from the Narrative that has been created about slavery in the West, a narrative that minimises and absolves Europeans from their responsibilities for slavery. Anything challenging this narrative feels like an attack not just on our history, but ourselves for having profited from its existence, no matter how indirectly. If we want to come to grips with our history of slavery therefore, this narrative first needs to be dismantled before the reality of slavery can be made clear: this is the goal of this book.

To do so, Fatah-Black first establishes what this narrative about slavery is. It starts with the idea that slavery was an inevitable and uncontroversial part of all ancient civilisations, particularly those that form the cradle of Western civilisation: Greece and Rome. Slavery as an universal concept every society participated in and which was the same in every civilisation that had it. Building on that, the idea is that the existence of slavery taught the West how important freedom is, while the rise of Christianity meant the abolishment of slavery in Europe, with Europe therefore leading the way towards a higher civilisation. Sadly however, as European nations started exploring the world, they came into contact with lesser civilised countries, where slavery still existed and had no choice but to accept it and use it themselves. However, thanks to the Enlightenment they were also the first to voluntarily abolish first the slave trade and then slavery itself, again leading the world.

It;s a very self serving narrative of course, as if we introduced slavery only to be able to abolish it later. But it is something that is still adhered to by many people, including historians. It ties in with the idea of slave owners as good patriarchs protecting people who were just not capable of leading themselves, who needed a firm hand to kep them fed and content. Nasty but seductive, Fatah-Black attempts to dismantle this story by first looking at historical slavery and then extending this history by looking at the voices of actual enslaved people themselves. In that first part, Fatah-Black goes from ancient Greece and Rome, to slavery in the Islamic World, to Atlantic slavery and in each period examines the idea that slavery was indeed natural and uncontroversial. In the second part, the idea that slavery was abolished voluntarily purely though the good will of the western powers is demolished.

To start with the latter, Fatah-Black goes into the history of slave rebellions, focusing in on Haiti and how this was the first country to abolish slavery and did this entirely through the efforts of the enslaved population. Inspired by the ideals of the French revolution the enslaved freed themselves, while France betrayed its own ideals with its attempts to re-enslave them. Of course Haiti was not the only revolt against slavery and Fatah-Black also looks at other examples. The intention is to show that even without the abolition movements in England and elsewhere, there was resistance against slavery and that this resistance sooner or later forced the abolition of slavery. He also provides the example of Tunesia, which abolished slavery in 1846, well before the Netherlands or the US did, to show abolition was not dependent on being a ‘western’ or christian society.

That there was this resistance and that this resistance was widespread is of course already an important clue that slavery was never as accepted or natural as its proponents then or apologists now like to claim it was. Even in societies like Ancient Greece or Rome where it was an accepted fact of life, there were still people who refused to and certainly a sense that it was not a good thing to be a slave. The idea that slavery is just a natural phase societies go through that will disappear once it is civilised enough is therefore shown to be wrong. Even in true slaver societies it is clear people knew slavery is wrong.

Remains the question why there is so much resistance against the true history of slavery and the unsavoury role western countries like the Netherlands played in the Atlantic slave trade. Perhaps it’s just not wanting to feel guilty for enjoying a level of wealth that is partially built on this crime. If we pretend slavery is just a normal thing societies go through, that we are actually praiseworthy for ending it voluntarily, no need to feel guilty or make reparations.

1983: The World at the Brink — Taylor Downing

Published on May 26, 2023Leave a comment

Cover of 1983

1983: The World at the Brink
Taylor Downing
391 pages including notes and index
published in 2018

If there ever was a movie that embodied the fears about nuclear war I had living through the early eighties, just old enough to understand the concept, it has to be Threads. I turned nine that year, just old enough to start to comprehend what nuclear war would be like. We had an insane cowboy in the White House who talked about a winneable nuclear war and a series of rapidly decomposing, extremely paranoid leaders in the Kremlin. One small mistake and the world would’ve ended. And while I didn’t learn about Threads long after the cold War had ended, I really didn’t need it to have nightmares. Any mention of anything nuclear on the news was enough to set them off. It didn’t help either that pop culture at that point was saturated with nuclear war imagery.

Fortunately, Threads was never broadcast in the Netherlands at that time, or I would’ve never been able to sleep ever again. Learning about it in a BBC retrospective somewhere around the turn of the millennium was traumatising enough already for the nightmares to return. That shot of the mushroom cloud going up over Sheffield with the old lady in the foreground pissing herself. That was the sort of fear and anxiety, that feeling of helplessness I grew up with in the eighties, in a country where you couldn’t pretend that you could have cool adventures fighting mutants afterwards. No, you either be dead or wishing you were. Being a sensitive kid I didn’t need to see nuclear war movies to imagine how horrible it would be. Which is why I won’t be celebrating Threads day by finally watching it.

Threads: Thursday May 26th 08:00

No, I prefer to feed my nightmares through print, like with Nigel Calder’s Nuclear Nightmares which I reread a couple of years ago. As with so many people my age I know, I can’t help but occasionally pick at that scab. Especially as I got older and learned more about the realities behind my nightmares, I can’t help but want to learn more about it, to confirm my fears weren’t unfounded. 1983: The World at the Brink is very good at doing exactly that. It not only confirmed that my childhood nuclear war paranoia was justified, it showed things were so much worse than I could’ve ever imagined back then. 1983 may very well have been the most dangerous year of the entire Cold War.

The way Taylor Downing sets about showing why this is the case is by providing a chronological overview of the year and its crisises, until about two-thirds into the book we hit the ultimate crisis point, the moment civilisation could’ve ended if things had gone even slightly differently. He starts with a short explanation of the context in which these incidents took place. How the detente of the seventies had ended with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the election of Ronald Reagan, gun-ho to take on the Evil Empire, in 1980. That with the death of Brezhnev in 1982, the head of the KGB, Andropov would be made the leader of the USSR,a man made paranoid by the Hungarian uprising of 1956, which he played a role in suppressing. Here there was a leader of the Free West who started talking about a winnable nuclear war opposite a Soviet leader deadly paranoid about attacks on his ‘socialist paradise’. Not a good combination in a time when tensions were already rising due to Afghanistan.

In 1981, while still head of the KGB, Andropov had already launched Operation RYAN, an intelligence programme aimed at determining whether the US and NATO were preparing for a nuclear first strike. By 1983 this operation was intensified as the US was starting to deploy cruise missile and Pershing II nuclear missiles to Europe as part of Reagan’s general re-armament plans. While RYAN was intended as a safety measure, its real effect was to feed Andropov’s paranoia, making him increasingly concerned that the US was planning a first strike. Reagan meanwhile, cheerfully unaware of this, was talking up plans to create a missile defence system against nuclear attacks, making America invulnerable. Regardless of the technical merits of Star Wars, even thinking about such a defence against nuclear attack was threatening the status quo of mutually assured destruction. Peace was being maintained because both sides could destroy the other completely, regardless of who shot first. There was no advantage in starting a nuclear war as long as everybody died in it. But if an increasing technological advance meant the US could defend itself, or could unleash such a devastating first strike that retaliation was impossible, that put the USSR in a dilemma. If the US was preparing a strike, the Soviets should strike immediately before the strike had even launched, or risk being caught off guard. And that was much more ripe for error than if you wait until the missiles have actually launched.

And then, in September 1983, a Korean airliner blundered into Soviet airspace, was mistaken for an American military spy plane and through a series of tragic errors, shut down with all passengers and crew killed. That immediately shut down any tentative prospect of unfreezing the Cold War. It strengthened Reagan’s opinion about the USSR being an evil empire, while it also fed Andropov’s paranoia about the country’s vulnerabilities, that an airliner had been allowed to enter sensitive airspace unchallenged. All this set the stage for Able Archer, a NATO military exercise, which simulated a Soviet invasion of West Germany culminating in a NATO nuclear strike to stop the advance. A so-called command post exercise, in which the various military headquarters were involved but not so much soldiers out in the field, the USSR was convinced it would be cover for a real first strike against it. It had take measures to reduce its vulnerability, by putting its nuclear forces on high alert, by making the preparations for a strike so that if it was necessary it could be done almost immediately. All that was needed was for Andropov to become convinced America was about to strike and give the order to strike first. And the moment that would happen came increasingly close as the NATO exercise grew in intensity.

At this point in the book Downing had thrown me deep into that paranoid mindset; my relief when the crisis passed was palpable, even knowing full well nuclear war hadn’t happened in November 1983. The rest of 1983: The World at the Brink is more cheerful, describing how both leaders walk themselves back from the abyss. How with the deaths of first Andropov and then his successor Chernenko the way was freed up for Gorbachev, a true reformer who managed to build a personal bond with Reagan, who set in motion the events that would lead to the end of the Cold War as well as the Soviet Union. Even more than three decades onwards, it’s still a miracle such a vast and powerful empire could be dissolved mostly peacefully, that we didn’t all die in nuclear shock waves in November 1983.

If you’re my generation, this book then is the confirmation of all the old bad dreams you had back then. If you’re too young to have lived through it yourself, a good look back a period where all this was normal.

Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd — Peter Verlinden

Published on July 17, 2022Leave a comment

Cover of Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd

Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd
Peter Verlinden
177 pages
published in 1995

Published in 1995 after the Rwandan genocide had just ended, Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd tries to explain the context and history in which it took place. The writer, Peter Verlinden is a Belgian journalist who had been covering events in both Rwanda and neighbouring Burundi for several years before. This is not a book about the genocide itself, which is only briefly touched upon in the last few chapters, but an explainer of what made it possible. With only 177 pages to cover the whole history of Rwanda it’s of necessity more of a sketch than a complete picture. As the title Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd (Hutu and Tutsi: Centuries of Conflict) indicates Verlinden argues that the genocide was only the latest in a long line of conflicts between the two ethnic groups and should be seen as such, not as some inexplicable outburst of violence. The genocide, together with what was happening at the same time in former Yugoslavia was what broke the short lived optimism brought on by the end of the Cold War. The idea that now the civilised world (sic) would be able to intervene in conflicts and resolve them was proven wrong by the inability or unwillingness of the UN to stop the genocide as it was happening.

By focusing on the supposed long standing history of ethnic violence in Rwanda you might read this as an excuse for the failure of Belgium and other interested nations to stop the genocide. We saw that line of thinking trotted out a lot during the early years of the Yugoslav civil wars, the idea that Serbs and Croats and Bosniaks just naturally hate each other which you couldn’t do anything about. I was a bit wary of this myself when I first read this, but on the whole I think Verlinden did a good job explaining the circumstances and history driving the genocide without excusing it. Verlinden lets the facts speak for themselves and it’s up to the reader to draw the conclusions and lament the missed opportunities to stop the genocide.

After setting out what the book is about, Verlinden starts with a short history of pre-colonial Rwandaand its first inhabitants, the Twa. These were forest dwellers until the Hutu appeared, some 200-3000 years ago, who brought agriculture with them. The Tutsi arrived later and were pastoralist herders. To say that the Tutsi conquered Rwanda from the Hutu would be wrong, but over the centuries their power did grow, conquering the various Hutu kingdoms. By the nineteenth century it was Tutsi king who ruled most of Rwanda and a Tutsi elite that shared that power, while the Hutu majority were mostly small farmers. A roughyl feudal society, with the Hutu farmers obliged to service their Tutsi masters in various ways through unpaid labour and taxes in kind. At the same time, there were no hard ethnic borders between Hutu and Tutsi. Hutu could become part of the elite even if that was rare and whether you were either depended as much perhaps on your social status as your ethnicity.

As per usual it was the colonisers that fucked things up. First the Germans, then the Belgians took that existing divide between Tutsi and Hutu and codified it as strict ethnicity. For various bullshit racist reasons the Tutsi were elevated as closest to being white and therefore natural leaders, which meant that they got most of the positions of power in government, church and trade. The Belgians especially favoured the Tutsi at first. It was only post-war, in the fifties that this stopped as new generations of Belgian colonial administrators and church officials started instead to take the impoverished Hutu’s side. Belgium never ruled Rwanda directly, but through the existing Tutsi kings, the same way the Germans had done. By now supporting a new generation of Hutu activists and intellectuals demanding a greater share of power, they of course threatened the monarchy and its power structures. Matters came to a head as Rwanda prepared for independence.

An attack on a Hutu politician led to mass attacks on Tutsi leaders and others. The kingdom collapsed, a republic was declared and hundred thousands of Tutsi fled abroad. In Rwanda itself Hutu took over much of Tutsi power and the republic lasted until 1973 when a coup deposed the government and the second republic was proclaimed. Throughout this there were low level tensions between the two groups and occassional outburst of violence, but the real trouble started in 1990, when Tutsi refugees invaded the country to liberate it. That led to several years of civil war and more mass violence against both Tutsi and Hutu, until a peace treaty was signed in early 1994. Everything seemed to be calming down again until the president was killed in an attack on his plane coming back from the peace conference. That was the point at which the genocide started, as at first the Tutsi rebels and sympathetic Tutsi leaders were targeted but quickly escalated to include all Tutsi or ‘Tutsi looking’ people were attacked, as well as moderate Hutu.

Hutu en Tutsi: Eeuwen Strijd concludes at this point. At the time of writing Rwanda was still in an uneasy peace, with Tutsi refugees from that first wave of violence at the establishment of the Rwandan Republic returning home after decades, while million others, mostly Hutu had now fled abroad. Many of the Rwandan Tutsi had died in the genocide and their place was taken over by the returnees, who became the new elite. You can see the fires for the next conflict already being stoked while the embers of this one were still glowing, the way Verlinden describes it. In the almost three decades that have been passed since a new genocide fortunately hasn’t happened, but the conflict ia still ongoing, with Hutu refugees in Burundi and the DRC continuing low level guerilla campaigns, while Rwande has intervened in the Congolean civil wars twice as well.

I first read this in 2002 when I got it as an ex-library book and reread it today purely because my eye fell on it. This was a decent primer on the context of the genocide, but these days you might as well read the Wikipedia articles on Rwanda and its history. that of course wasn’t an option in 1995 and barely one in 2002, so I’m grateful to Verlinden for this.