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The Death of Nelson, by the Victorian artist Daniel Maclise, captures the moment that Admiral Horatio Nelson was fatally wounded by a shot from a French sharpshooter at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, in which the British Navy was victorious over a French–Spanish fleet. Despite dying early in the battle, Nelson’s leadership was crucial to its outcome.

In our current age, ‘leadership’ is taught as a classroom subject, as if everyone could become a leader if they paid enough attention and did their homework. The history of warfare through the ages should be enough to disabuse us of this illusion. The quality of leadership has varied widely in battle. The fact of command does not turn an indifferent officer into a true leader, any more than a leadership seminar today can turn someone into a leader of tomorrow. Indeed, it is possible for a leader to emerge quite independent of the formal military structures, as the success of Spartacus as leader of the slave rebellion against Rome, or the victory of the iconic Che Guevara in the Cuban Revolution, have both demonstrated. Successful military leaders are usually defined by their successes, but in many conflicts this means success on the battlefield, once, twice or many times, rather than success in war. Napoleon Bonaparte and Erich von Manstein are two such figures whose qualities of leadership are not in doubt, with an impressive list of battle successes, but both faced historical forces that doomed their efforts to eventual failure.

What, then, defines leadership in battle if it is not ultimate strategic or political triumph? This is a difficult question to answer because the nature of battlefield leadership has changed considerably through time. When rulers and generals led their men in person, leadership was based partly on the bravery and fighting skill they displayed as an example to their men. When a leader fell or was killed, the effect on those fighting around him could be disastrous, as it was in the medieval battle of Legnano when the German king, Frederick Barbarossa, fell from his horse in the fighting and disappeared from view. Leaders who ran risks were respected; those who sat prudently on a nearby hill or in their tent relied on lesser commanders to win the loyalty of their troops and sustain their will to fight. In modern wars, the leaders seldom shared the dangers of battle and could be remote from the action. Their skill lay in working out the operational strategy that would secure victory, and their qualities were managerial as well as physical. Even then, knowledge that the leader was there, in contact, was still important. When Napoleon retired hurriedly from the disastrous campaign in Russia in 1812, he doomed his remaining, hopeless troops.

The most distinguished battlefield leaders have been those who combined a grasp of operational reality, a willingness to be imaginative with new technology and tactics, a courage and confidence communicated to those around them, and a willingness to share the dangers of combat. When Alexander the Great went calmly to his tent to sleep on the night before the Battle of Gaugamela, his nervous officers were uncertain how to react. Alexander assured them that victory was certain and, according to the ancient accounts, slept soundly. The overwhelming majority of battles through recorded history suggest that soldiers and sailors fought on the day for their leader rather than for any great ideal, whether religious, political or national. This explains how fighters from very different ethnic or cultural or national communities, often pressed involuntarily into service, could still fight side-by-side against the common foe. The battlefield was a community all of its own in which leaders of whatever kind played a decisive part in holding that community together.

On 16 June 1743, British king George II, then nearly sixty years old, led an army of British and German troops against the French at the Battle of Dettingen. This was the last time a British monarch personally led an army into battle.

It is obvious in any history of battles that leadership is not a universal quality among military leaders, and many of those on the losing side were poor planners, with little grasp of the battlefield, were overconfident or arrogant in their assessment of the enemy, or were simply lacking in the necessary courage and optimism their forces needed. Such leaders can be found in many of the battles selected here. On the other hand, it was possible to have two leaders of evident quality pitted against each other, where only one could win. The Battle of Hastings perhaps comes closest to that model. It would be difficult to fault Harold for what went wrong that day and no-one would consider it a historical anomaly had he won the field rather than William. This is a reminder that even leadership was seldom enough on its own, which is why innovation, deception, raw courage or good fortune were there to supplement it.

No. 1

BATTLE OF GAUGAMELA 1 October 331 BCE

In October 331 BCE, Alexander the Great destroyed in a single day the power of the largest empire in the Middle East, that of the Persian ruler Darius III. Success had followed Alexander since he took the throne of Macedonia in 336 BCE, but victory over Persia and its allies sealed his reputation as a military genius aged twenty-five.

Alexander succeeded to the throne following the murder of his father, Philip. Within five years, he had confronted the Persian Empire and its wide network of satrapies (governors) in Anatolia, the coastal communities along the eastern Mediterranean littoral and in Egypt. He seems to have been an instinctive battlefield commander, though aware of the lessons to be drawn from triumphs of the past and the strategic practices of his father. In 333 BCE, he inflicted a heavy defeat on the Persian emperor at the narrow coastal plain around Issus in northern Syria, but failed to capture him. Alexander had ambitions to become master not only of Western Asia and Greece, but of the entire area the wealthy warrior empire of Persia had ruled for centuries. In 331 BCE, he set out from Egypt to track Darius down somewhere in present-day Iraq, determined it seems to inflict a decisive defeat on the Persians. He went armed with news, so the classical historians asserted, from the oracle at Siwah in Egypt’s Western Desert that he might be the son of Zeus, chief of the Greek gods. This certainly might explain the remarkable confidence that Alexander displayed in the final showdown against a Persian army at least four times larger than his own.

The Battle of Gaugamela is illustrated in this tapestry, based on a painting by the 17th-century French artist, Charles Le Brun (1619–90). Le Brun undertook a series of paintings in the 1660s and 1670s depicting the triumphs of Alexander the Great, as homage to his wealthy patron, King Louis XIV.

The Macedonian force was still large – 40,000 foot soldiers and 7,000 cavalry – and its movement across hundreds of miles of territory was an organizational feat in its own right. Alexander crossed from Egypt to Syria, where he lingered for some weeks, waiting to hear if Darius was preparing his own army for combat. When news reached him in mid-July of the Persian emperor’s whereabouts, Alexander led his army towards the River Euphrates, intent on his showdown. On the opposite side there were 3,000 of Darius’s cavalry under the command of Mazaeus, but they withdrew southwards, scorching the earth as they went. This was to force Alexander to take the longer northern route past the Armenian mountains then down into the valley of the Tigris, where Darius was already preparing his battlefield near the village of Gaugamela. Stakes and snares were set to halt a cavalry charge; the ground was flattened to enable the 200 Persian chariots armed with sharp scythes to run straight and fast at the ranks of the enemy. Ancient authors talked of one million men in the Persian army, but the number is likely to have been perhaps 200,000, of whom 30,000 were cavalry drawn from all over the empire. Fifteen Indian elephants were to guard the centre of the Persian line.

Alexander captured Persians sent to reconnoitre his force and learned exactly where Darius was. On 29 September, he ordered his army to march off in battle order for a possible night attack on the enemy; sensing their fear as they sighted the 100,000 camp fires of the enemy host, Alexander called a halt on the heights overlooking the ‘Camel’s Hump’, the hill from which Gaugamela took its name. He spent the day exhorting his troops and inspecting the prepared battleground. In the evening he made a sacrifice in honour of Fear, to propitiate the emotion. Then he worked out his battle plan in detail with his commanders, compensating for the strength of the enemy by unconventional means.

On the following morning, 1 October, Alexander woke late, well rested and confident of the outcome – a mood that was intended to inspire confidence in his men. His complex battle-line was drawn up: on the left, a large body of horse and shield-bearers under Parmenion; in the centre, 10,000 of the highly-trained Foot Companions in a phalanx armed with the formidable two-handed 6-metre (20-foot) sarissa spears, flanked by 3,000 shield-bearers (light infantry); and sloping to the right, creating an angled front, Alexander with his cavalry, fronted by archers and slingers. On each wing a ‘flap’ of cavalry was attached, among whom were concealed heavily-armed infantry, which could fall back to protect the rest from encirclement. Behind these were 20,000 reserve infantry, which could be moved forwards to create a large protected oblong.

Managing such a complex battlefield was difficult, as information could only be sent by messenger or trumpet, and thick dust was thrown up by the horses wheeling around on the sandy earth. Alexander’s strategy carried risks should any of the units misunderstand their orders or fail to hold fast. Darius had a simpler plan: to send forward his much larger bodies of cavalry, to decimate the Foot Companions with the scythed chariots, and to scare off the Greek cavalry with the elephants. Around mid-day, Alexander’s army moved onto the prepared battlefield in tight order. What happened next relies on accounts whose authors had a vested interest in painting Alexander’s achievements in glowing colours, but the main shape of the battle seems clear. Alexander moved his cavalry forwards but to the right to tempt the Persian left to follow him, thus exposing the centre and opening up a gap in the Persian line. On rougher ground, the Persian Scythian cavalry charged at Alexander, but were caught up among foot soldiers and archers. Darius released the chariots, but they were subjected to an accurate volley of arrows and sling-shots; those that reached the Macedonian lines were let through, then slaughtered by the soldiers behind. The rest of Alexander’s line was subject to heavy cavalry attack, and might well have collapsed, but Alexander, looking for the gap caused in the Persian centre, wheeled round and charged directly at Darius and his entourage, avoiding the elephants. The Macedonian Foot Companions with their fearsome sarissas and their cry of ‘alalalalai’ surged forwards and Darius, sensing his extreme danger, fled from the scene.

The flight of the emperor seems to have infected much of the rest of the Persian army, which melted away to the south and east. Large numbers of horsemen had succeeded in cutting past Parmenion and rampaged forward to seize Alexander’s baggage camp, where, to their surprise, they met the 20,000 reserves, who overwhelmed and destroyed them. Alexander rode off after Darius but his rearguard fought a ferocious defence and by the time the battlefield could be left behind and the hunt begun, Darius was already far away, fleeing to the mountains and the safety of the city of Ecbatana (Hamadan). The Persian emperor had overestimated the power of sheer numbers and fought a predictable battle; Alexander, by contrast, had made the most of his limited numbers, using them to unhinge the enemy at a crucial moment by careful exploitation of combined-arms tactics. Victory at Gaugamela brought him a reputation in the classical world to match the mythic stories of Achilles or of Hercules. Alexander moved on to Babylon and then the Persian capital at Susa. In so doing, he became, it has been estimated, the richest man in the known world.

No. 2

BATTLE OF CANNAE 2 August 216 BCE

The Battle of Cannae is one of the most famous battles of all time. The catastrophic defeat of the Roman army by Hannibal’s smaller force has been regularly invoked to describe a particularly dramatic or heavy defeat. The myth that surrounded Hannibal as a general who carried victory with him wherever he went has lived down the ages. Hannibal’s own presence at Cannae and his operational genius explain an outcome that might well have gone another way.

The North African empire of Carthage dominated present-day Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and areas of conquest as far as Spain. The rising might of Rome in the third century BCE challenged Carthaginian ambitions and led to a series of Punic Wars between the two rival powers. In the second of these, at some point in 218 BCE, Hannibal persuaded the Carthaginian senate to let him set off on an epic journey across Spain, present-day France and over the Alps into Italy. What his ultimate objective was remains unclear, but he took with him an invasion force of probably 100,000 men, many of them Spanish mercenaries, and a huge train of supplies and animals, including his famous elephants. The journey itself undermined the scale of his ambitions. By the time the Alps were reached, he was down to 50,000 men; after crossing the mountains in autumn snow, he arrived in the northern Po Valley with only 20,000 foot soldiers and 6,000 cavalry to invade the Roman heartland. Bolstered by Gauls who joined his cause, Hannibal meted out heavy defeats on the Roman armies sent north to intercept him. As he moved south, Rome was gripped by panic. Hannibal’s military reputation inflated the threat out of all proportion. Lacking a secure base, living off the land, and not entirely sure of his Gallic allies, Hannibal chose to inflict on Rome what damage he could while himself avoiding defeat.

In 216 BCE, Hannibal moved into Apulia in south-central Italy and in June that year set up his camp at the hilltop city of Cannae, guarding the route to the rich grain-lands of the south. The Romans had begun to create a force to eliminate the threat from the invader. Four new legions were raised, bringing the Romans’ strength to around 40,000 men with 40,000 allied soldiers, but only a small number of experienced cavalry. The two Roman consuls for 216 BCE, Gaius Terentius Varro and Lucius Aemilus Paullus, led the new army south to meet Hannibal, whose forces they probably outnumbered by two to one. At the beginning of August, the Roman army arrived at the flat plain in front of Cannae. As was customary, the consuls took turns to command on alternate days; Varro was the more audacious and on 2 August 216 BCE he led his force, spread out over nearly a mile, onto the plain to do battle. Accounts of the battle suggest that the infantry were packed between fifty and seventy ranks thick. The Roman cavalry were on one wing and the allied cavalry on the other, with a river protecting one flank. Roman battlefield strategy was to smash the enemy by sheer weight of numbers.

A nineteenth-century engraving of the Battle of Cannae (216 BCE) shows Hannibal on horseback while his Carthaginian and allied soldiers strip the dead Romans of anything valuable. The battle was one of the most comprehensive defeats inflicted in the whole history of war.

At Cannae, Hannibal showed his exceptional grasp of the battlefield. He formed his infantry into a shallow force, weaker in the centre, with his veteran Libyans on both flanks. On one wing were Numidian cavalry, on the other Spanish and Gallic, 10,000 experienced horsemen who greatly outnumbered the 6,000 Roman horses. His infantry were ordered to form a bulge outwards with the object of enticing the Roman legions into the arc, which would then bend inwards, giving the wings the chance to encircle and annihilate the enemy while the cavalry defeated the enemy horsemen and turned to attack the Roman army from the rear. It was a textbook operation and functioned like clockwork. The Romans pressed forward into the yielding arc, only to find themselves surrounded as the Libyan infantry advanced on the flanks. The Carthaginian cavalry swept aside Rome’s horsemen and plunged into the Roman rear. Cannae was a massacre, the worst defeat the Roman army ever suffered. An estimated 50,000 died that day; others were taken prisoner. Only 14,500 survived out of an army of 80,000. Hannibal lost 6,000, two-thirds of them Gauls. No effort was made to bury so many dead, which included Paullus and eighty Roman senators. The gold rings and ornaments were collected from the dead and sent to Carthage to show the extent of the victory and to demonstrate the need for reinforcements.

Hannibal could perhaps have marched on Rome and brought the empire to its knees. The disaster at Cannae left the city briefly defenceless, though new legions were immediately raised. The Senate ordered that there should be no weeping, and buried two Greeks and two Gauls alive to propitiate the gods. But Hannibal perhaps sensed that his depleted force was not large enough to march the 500 kilometres (300 miles) to Rome and to invest the city. Carthage was too busy fighting in Sicily, Spain and Sardinia to send help, so Hannibal undertook limited campaigns in southern Italy for a further fourteen years, too dangerous an opponent for the Romans to challenge again. To scare the citizens, he took 2,000 cavalry up to the gates of the city in 212 BCE, but could not risk a siege.

When Hannibal’s brother Hasdrubal came to join him in 207 BCE by the same awkward route over the Alps, his forces were devastated near present-day Rimini and Hasdrubal was killed. Carthage was undermined on every front except in the south of Italy, where Hannibal was isolated. In 202 BCE, he finally left Italy for good to return to Carthage. A battlefield genius, he did not know how to win the war.

No. 3

BATTLE OF ACTIUM 2 September 31 BCE

The victory won at Actium off the coast of Greece by Julius Caesar’s adopted son, Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (better known as Octavian, and soon to become Augustus) marked a decisive end to the long period of savage civil wars that had plagued Republican Rome from the middle years of the first century BCE. The battle was fought between the two most powerful men in the Roman Republic: Octavian, ruler of the western half of the Roman territories; and Marcus Antonius (better known as Mark Antony), ruler of the eastern region. Octavian had little reputation as a commander or soldier, but from an early age he had understood how to balance the arts of politics and war. Mark Antony was out-thought by a leader whose political intelligence and strategic calculation opened the way to a new imperial age.

This painting of Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium (31 BCE) was made by the Austrian rococo painter Johann Georg Platzer (1704–61), famous for his historical and allegorical subjects. In reality, during the battle that ended the Roman Civil War, Cleopatra stayed back from the conflict until there was room for her vessels to escape into the open sea.

After the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BCE, there followed an uneasy decade as Caesar’s supporters fought against the defenders of Republican Rome and rival claimants to his mantle. Octavian became the dominant figure in Italy because he was more clear-sighted and unscrupulous than his competitors. Though he had no constitutional basis for his claim to rule, he was backed by soldiers loyal to the legacy of the great Caesar, and had enough money to buy the loyalty of others. He collaborated with Antony for much of the decade, and relied on Antony’s military help against the armies raised by Caesar’s assassins. But by 34 BCE, when Antony married the Egyptian queen Cleopatra in a theatrical ceremony in Alexandria, Octavian could see the possibility that Mark Antony might soon want control of the whole Roman sphere and not just the east. By 32 BCE, their rivalry was overt. One-third of the Senate in Rome supported Mark Antony and fled to join his army, which was gathering in Turkey; Octavian had been busy recruiting supporters in Italy, raising taxes for a military expedition, buying the loyalty of his own troops and spreading hostile propaganda against his rival. Ambition turned both heads as the two men contemplated the prospect of ruling the whole Roman world.

In the second half of the year, Antony brought an army of around 100,000 soldiers and 12,000 cavalry to Greece, supported by 500 ships, many of them huge triremes capable of carrying large numbers of soldiers and catapults to be used while ramming and boarding enemy vessels. The object was to prepare for an invasion of Italy, or to lure Octavian into a land battle, which Antony was confident of winning. The fleet was scattered along the coastal ports, but around 250 ships were concentrated in the Gulf of Ambracia, a bay on the west coast of Greece protected by a narrow strait near the town of Actium. They included sixty vessels supplied by Cleopatra, who had accompanied her new consort to witness his triumphant return to Rome. Octavian knew that he had time on his side and decided to blockade Antony. His own fleet, commanded by the very effective Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, preyed on Antony’s supply routes. Octavian moved his army of around 80,000 legionaries and 12,000 horsemen to Greece and set up camp well to the north in order to avoid a land battle, while the fleet of Antony and Cleopatra remained bottled up at Actium, unwilling to risk a major sea battle against the larger naval forces waiting beyond the Gulf.

In this trial of wills, Octavian understood that Antony’s expeditionary force could only decline in fighting power as it struggled to find food and fodder locally and to cope with camp diseases. There were defections to Octavian as morale declined. Antony’s decision to base himself at Actium had been a mistake, but Octavian exploited this misjudgement to the full by avoiding a pitched battle and relying on attrition. Unable to bring his strength to bear against an evasive enemy, Antony decided that his only option was to try to break out of the Gulf and fight his way through Agrippa’s blockade. He concealed his intention from his already demoralized army and when a strong northwest wind arrived on 2 September 31 BCE, Antony ordered his fleet, now reduced to no more than 170 vessels, out of the Gulf and into the open sea.

The four-hour battle that followed was directed by Octavian, who was aboard a small brigantine (suffering, it has been suggested, from sea-sickness), but fought by his admiral, Agrippa. The long delay and the strategy of blockade both played to Octavian’s advantage. Antony’s ships did not seek battle, but were equipped with sails and masts for a break-out. The decks of his ships were cluttered with stores and 20,000 marines, who were embarked with the fleet. His oarsmen were hungry and disease-ridden and no match now for Agrippa’s 400 faster and lighter ships, but they were forced to fight rather than flee. As Antony’s three squadrons came out of the gulf they formed into a crescent, with a fourth squadron of Cleopatra’s sixty ships behind them, prepared with full sail and carrying the treasure needed to fund the war. Agrippa was ready for them. His right squadron engaged with Mark Antony’s left at once, coming to close quarters and using marines to devastate and board the enemy vessels.

As Mark Antony’s right tried to manoeuvre around Agrippa’s fleet, the latter moved his ships further north to envelop the enemy, until the two wings became separated from the rest of the battle. As the centre opened up, Cleopatra seized her moment to sail between the two fighting wings out into the open sea. Mark Antony and some of his vessels on the right then followed them, but sensing that his flagship was too slow, he transferred to a lighter and faster vessel and caught up with Cleopatra, leaving his fleet and his army to their fate.

That fate was harsh indeed. At least two-thirds of the fleet was captured after several hours of fierce fighting and perhaps 10,000 men killed, some of them, according to ancient accounts, ‘mangled by sea monsters’. Much of the army came over to Octavian and those who fled the scene surrendered not long after in Macedonia. The victory at Actium owed something to the mistakes of Antony and Cleopatra, but much to the strategic understanding of Octavian, who, though he lacked the hero’s touch, understood that a battle could be won by patient waiting and the fruits of calculated attrition. The following year, Octavian pursued Antony and Cleopatra to Egypt, captured Alexandria and shared its treasures with his army. Mark Antony stabbed himself and perished in Cleopatra’s arms; she died nine days later once it was clear no deal could be struck with Octavian, reputedly from the bites of twin asps. Gaius Octavianus returned in triumph to Rome in 29 BCE and was declared ‘Augustus’ by the Senate two years later, de facto ruler of the Roman Empire. A holiday was proclaimed to mark the victory in Egypt, still celebrated in Italy two millennia later as ‘Ferragosto’.

No. 4

BATTLE OF THE MILVIAN BRIDGE 28 October 312

The battle between two rival emperors outside the gates of Rome in 312 CE was memorable not so much for what happened on the battlefield between two opponents steeped in Roman fighting traditions, but because Constantine, who had come to capture Rome, was supposed not long before the battle to have had a vision of the Christian cross in the sky with the inscription ‘by this win’, and a dream in which Jesus told him to use the symbol of Christ (the Greek letters ‘chi-rho’). It is claimed that Constantine, buoyed up by this apparition, led his army to a certain victory over the pagan Maxentius and opened the way to Europe’s Christian age. At the Milvian Bridge, God was on the side of the victor. Constantine was a leader on a divine mission.

The Roman Empire in the early fourth century was ruled by a ‘tetrarchy’ of four emperors, each ruling over a defined imperial territory. At York in 306, Constantine was declared ruler of the northern provinces of the empire, which covered present-day Britain, France (Gaul), Belgium and western Germany. That same year, the young Maxentius usurped the imperial title in Rome. A year later, one of the four emperors, Galerius, attempted to overthrow the usurper, but without success. Then in 312, Constantine, a popular ruler in contrast to the brutal and untrustworthy Maxentius, marched across the Alps at Susa to try his luck at capturing Rome, still regarded as the centre of the empire. His army captured Turin and Milan, won a battle at Brescia, then laid siege to Verona, where it defeated Maxentius’s leading general as he tried to flee. From a small force, Constantine’s army was augmented by deserters from Maxentius’s cause. He marched south towards Rome, mustering an estimated 50,000 men.

Detail from a tapestry of wool and silk designed by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) to show the triumph of Constantine over Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge. The tapestry was produced in 1623–25, one of a series on the emperor Constantine.

To oppose him, Maxentius had perhaps 100,000 men to call on, though many were less well-trained than those of his opponent, raised from levies forced on a reluctant population. He gathered stores of wheat and supplies to withstand a siege, as he had done successfully with Galerius. To hold up Constantine’s advance, he ordered the destruction of the wide stone Milvian Bridge across the Tiber, which lay on the path of his enemy’s army. But at the last moment he changed his mind and decided that his forces were large enough to secure a land victory. A new pontoon bridge was constructed, and Maxentius led his large army across it to Saxa Rubra. At the core were the famous Praetorian Guards (the elite imperial bodyguard), and on the flanks were the new heavy cavalry modelled on the Persian example. Opposed to them was a conventional force of Roman infantry supported to either side by experienced horsemen. Constantine’s forces, so it is said, were told to paint the ‘chi-rho’ sign on their shields to show that they were protected by the new Christian God. They marched into battle inspired by Constantine’s vision and the certainty of victory.

Victory was in fact far from certain, since Maxentius had the much larger force, but Constantine, in imitation of Alexander the Great, led his seasoned cavalry in a determined charge against the horsemen on the flanks of Maxentius’s army. Little is known in detail about the battle, and what is recorded comes from a later account by the Christian bishop Eusebius, based on conversations with Constantine, and cannot be regarded as reliable. However, the outcome is known with certainty. Constantine’s cavalry smashed their opponents and drove them back to the Tiber. The infantry lines of Maxentius were exposed to flank attacks and the line caved in. Panicking soldiers fled to the pontoon bridge or tried to cross the river, while the Praetorian Guard held its ground and was cut down rank by rank where it stood. Whether the pontoon bridge collapsed or the unruly crowd surging across it pushed others into the water, the fleeing Maxentius ended up drowned in the Tiber, weighed down by his armour. His body was dredged out and decapitated, and his head displayed on a lance as Constantine marched on into the city.

The extent to which Constantine’s army fought and won because of his vision is open to debate. His forces won notable military successes in northern Italy without the aid of divine inspiration, but with an astute and experienced commander to guide them. It is not clear how Constantine himself interpreted his vision, since he had previously claimed to see visions of pagan gods, particularly Apollo. After his capture of Rome, which left him as unchallenged ruler of the western part of the empire, he admitted to many subsequent visions of Jesus. Modern accounts suggest a possible atmospheric phenomenon which Constantine interpreted as he wished, but since he claimed to have had visions often, he may have been the victim of hallucinations caused, experts now think, by a particular form of migraine. Whatever the truth, Constantine knew how to use the vision to his advantage; in this case it must have reinforced the confidence of his men in a leader who had already proved his qualities on numerous occasions. There are times in battle when a perceptive leader can see how the supernatural might help, as Alexander had at Gaugamela.

The Battle of the Milvian Bridge became a reference point for the establishment of Christianity in the Western Roman Empire. A year after the battle, Constantine published an edict of religious toleration at Milan and, although only a small percentage of the Roman population was yet Christian, the victory at the bridge and the support of Constantine for Christianity worked rapidly to spread the religion, with its now protected status, across the Western Empire. The legends surrounding the Milvian Bridge were what counted, not the truth of a battle that was just one of many internecine conflicts in the fading years of Roman imperial rule, won by a man who had been happily pagan only years before.

No. 5

BATTLE OF HASTINGS 14 October 1066

The most famous battle in all English history is undoubtedly the bloody day-long struggle between the Anglo-Saxon forces of the English king, Harold II, and the invading army of William, Duke of Normandy. It has been known for centuries as the Battle of Hastings, but it was fought on a narrow slope leading up to what is now the small Sussex town of Battle, halfway between Pevensey and Hastings, a short distance from the English Channel. With around 7,000 men apiece, William and Harold battled for the future history of England.

The cause of the battle was the straightforward prospect of ruling a prosperous and fertile country. English territory was divided between areas of Viking and Anglo-Saxon settlement, and for several centuries had been the object of the ambitions of Scandinavian rulers. The throne of England was an unstable inheritance, and when King Edward, known as the Confessor, died on 5 January 1066 without an heir, there were a number of claimants to the English throne. The English earls elected Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex (in southwest England), who had no direct blood ties to the royal line, but was a tough and successful warrior. In the space of less than a year, he faced two separate invasions by claimants who did have royal blood, and believed that the throne belonged to them. In September 1066, the king of Norway, Harald Hardrada (‘hard ruler’), invaded northeast England with a large Viking army, determined to wrest control of the kingdom; less than a month later, a Norman army under William landed in the south, driven by the same ambition.

Battle Abbey, near the site of the Battle of Hastings on the Sussex coast, was begun by William the Conqueror after the Pope had told him in 1070 to do penance for all the English he had killed. It was completed after his death. The actual battlefield can still be seen on a sloping field below the abbey.

Politics in early medieval England was decided by the sword. William had been promised the throne of England not only by Edward the Confessor, but, or so the Normans claimed, by Harold Godwinson himself. An ambitious and violent soldier, descended from Viking settlers, Duke William had already subjugated much of the area around his duchy of Normandy. In the summer of 1066, he summoned his own levies and those of his allies and vassals to mount an invasion of England. He had 700 boats built in a short space of time, but he still needed favourable winds. His army of 2,500 horsemen (with 2,000 horses), 1,000 archers and 3,000 infantry was forced to sit on the coast for 45 days before the wind finally changed. At dawn on 28 September, the army disembarked on the coast at Pevensey and awaited the English. The strength of William’s invasion force lay in the body of heavily armoured cavalry, by then commonly used in battles in France but rare in England, and also the archers, whose longbows and crossbows could rain arrows down on the enemy infantry. Almost all his men were trained soldiers rather than conscripted militia, with experience in using the bows, javelins and swords with which they were armed.

One of fifty scenes from the Bayeux Tapestry, woven at Bayeux Cathedral in the late eleventh century on orders from William the Conqueror’s brother, Bishop Odo, depicts the Norman soldiers with their cavalry mounts. Hundreds of horses were transported across the English Channel from Normandy, but Duke William had to be sure of victory since there was no way to resupply his knights with mounts if the war became drawn out.

Harold was on the other side of England. On 20 September at Fulford, near York, an army of 10,000 Vikings under Harald Hardrada and Harold’s brother, Tostig Godwinson, annihilated a force of perhaps 6,000 under earls Edwin and Morcar. Collecting levies from the south, Harold rode north from London, moving so quickly that his 5,000 men found the Viking invaders unprepared on both sides of the River Derwent, near a small village at Stamford Bridge. Charging the forces on one side of the river, the English soldiers slaughtered them all before crossing the narrow bridge and falling on the rest of the invasion force. Some 7,000 corpses littered the battlefield. Only 24 out of the 500 ships that had carried the Vikings to England were needed to take the survivors home.

Harold’s victory ended any prospect in the near future of Scandinavian intervention in English affairs. If Hardrada’s invasion had been his only problem, the battle would be hailed as the start of a different English history. But messengers told Harold that another enemy awaited him in Sussex, ravaging the countryside, burning villages and towns and seizing their goods. He rode south with his tired and battered army and arrived at London on 6 October, where he was joined by other levies and his brothers Gyrth and Leofwine. Harold had at his command a mixed army of Anglo-Saxon nobility, their ‘housecarles’ or professional soldiers, and the trained militia, the fyrd. He was joined by a number of Danish mercenaries, or lithsmen. The housecarles and nobility wore long protective mail coats or ‘hauberks’ and carried spears, daggers and the deadly double-handed battleaxes that could cleave a man and horse in two. The fyrd were more lightly armed, and wore only thick leather jerkins. The principal tactic of Harold’s army was the shield wall, composed of lines of housecarles with heavy shields, forming a solid barrier of the toughest soldiery against which enemy attacks were designed to be broken by sheer physical power and the courage of the defending fighters.

Harold moved south, arriving opposite William’s army on 13 October, and camped near the shallow Caldbec Hill. His army left their horses and proceeded early on the morning of 14 October to take up position at the top of a long but shallow slope, protected on both sides by swampy ground, where Harold set up a solid shield wall some ten or twelve men deep and perhaps 7,000-strong in total. Although he had successfully used a cavalry charge at Stamford Bridge, Harold chose to fight without cavalry and with very few archers. The shield wall, in contrast, was a primitive tactic to choose against William and left very little flexibility. The Norman army was drawn up in the early morning in a way that made the most of the mixed force William had brought with him. There were three sections: Flemish allies on the right, a Breton force on the left, and 3,500 cavalry and heavy infantry in the centre led by William. Throughout the day the Norman duke displayed a shrewd tactical judgement, making the most of his cavalry and his archers, probing to find a way to wear down the shield wall. Occasionally, as the legend of Hastings has it, his cavalry made feints as if to retreat, tempting Harold’s soldiers to run after them, only for the Anglo-Saxons to suddenly be surrounded and cut down.

Battle was joined at around 9 a.m. Since the Normans were attacking up a slope, Harold had some advantages. His spearmen could throw more powerfully downwards, while William’s archers had to fire uphill, and his cavalry were forced to charge against the gradient. Most medieval battles were over in a couple of hours, but Hastings, contested by two battle-hardened and professional forces, lasted the whole day, at a terrible cost to both sides. At one point, the ferocity of the English stand broke the left flank of William’s force and threatened a more general retreat, rather than a ruse to lure the enemy into pursuit. Accounts of the battle have William removing his helmet to show he had not been slain and shouting to his men to hold firm and rally. They did so, just as a large group of English militia chased after them, thinking the whole army was in flight. The Anglo-Saxons were surrounded on a hillock and, despite a desperate effort to save themselves, each one was bludgeoned or speared to death where he stood.

William then opted for attrition. Small groups of horsemen and heavy infantry attacked, taking casualties but also eating into the shield wall. Hour after hour of gory combat left all the men exhausted, desperate with thirst, and covered in wounds, great and small. The corpses were so many that it proved hard at times to fight on the slope made slippery with their blood. After six hours of slaughter, William could see that attrition was taking a greater toll of the enemy. He ordered a charge against the shield wall by all his surviving army. The Anglo-Saxon line gave way, and small groups of housecarles rallied round their lords as the Norman wave washed over them. Harold and his brothers were killed, the king so mutilated by the hacking Norman swords that his body could only be identified later by his mistress.

There was no concept of surrender and Harold’s surviving men could be butchered where they were found. Some 4,000 of the Anglo-Saxon army died at Hastings, 2,000 of William’s men. William marched north to London, where he was crowned king in Westminster Abbey. England became a Norman province, united under one monarch. It is easy to be sentimental about Harold’s defeat, but he, like William, was just one of a long line of warrior noblemen, with Norse blood in their veins, who fought to the death for land and wealth. What made William different was his sharp military mind, shown in his ability to ‘manage’ the battlefield in an age of primitive combat. Crude though the fighting was, William’s victory rested on solid military understanding and bold leadership.

No. 6

BATTLE OF ZHONGDU 1215

There are few military leaders in world history with a more elevated reputation than the Mongol tribesman Temüjin, better known to history as Genghis Khan, or Chingghis Khan. Conqueror of half of Asia, his name became a byword for military ruthlessness and competence. No ambition was more vaunted or, in the end, more successful than his conquest of the vast northern Chinese Empire of the Jurchen Jin in the first decades of the thirteenth century. Few battles are more symbolic of the shift in the Asian power balance than the fight in 1214–15 to capture the Jin capital of Zhongdu on a site near present-day Beijing.

Temüjin left few records and many of those who knew him well were illiterate. He was an outcast from his Mongol tribe following the death of his high-ranking father, and was said to have learned how to judge others and exploit their differences from his mother, Hoelun. He overcame the disadvantages of his youth and became a successful Mongol prince and warlord, his exploits and his political cunning attracting Mongol warriors to his side. Since the tribal rivalries of the Mongolian plain were a constant source of jealous friction and political uncertainty, there seems little doubt that Temüjin’s own astuteness, ruthlessness and shrewd judgement, as much as his success in almost constant fighting, explain his emergence as the dominant figure over the Mongol peoples. By 1206, he had become at last Genghis Khan, ruler of the Mongols, the name by which he is commonly remembered.

In 1211, he embarked on the conquest of northern China, then ruled by the Jurchen Jin dynasty, which had captured the region from the Song some years before. His army probably totalled about 120,000, though the exact figures are not known. Mongol society was organized for military operations, since all men between the ages of fourteen and sixty were liable to serve when required. They learned to ride and to fire the powerful composite bows of the steppe horsemen from an early age; large hunting trips were used as surrogates for military training. Genghis Khan insisted on tough discipline, executing anyone who abandoned the fight or began to plunder before the order was given. The Mongol army was organized into units based on a decimal system: 10,000 men made a division, or tümen; each division was divided into units of 1,000, those into hundreds and the core unit was one of ten men. They were adept at ambushes and feints, and retained exceptional mobility.

A print showing the Mongol emperor Genghis Kahn (c.1162–1227). After uniting all the Mongol tribes under his leadership, Genghis Kahn conquered the whole of northern China, ruled by the Jin dynasty, including the siege and conquest of the vast capital city at Zhongdu.

The standard Mongol military practices, however, could not easily be deployed against large cities unless the garrison was foolish enough to sally out to fight. The conquest of Jin China required siege equipment, so Genghis recruited Chinese experts to supplement his large cavalry army. Much of the frontier area was conquered in rapid and devastating raids, but Genghis knew it was necessary to seize the Jin capital at Zhongdu to complete the conquest. The vast capital, surrounded by 15 kilometres (10 miles) of walls, 12 metres (40 feet) high, protected by 900 towers and a triple moat, was larger than any city the Mongols had captured. It was defended by an estimated 36,000 men, including 20,000 inside the walls and 4,000 stationed in each of four subsidiary towns where stores were kept, connected to Zhongdu by underground tunnels. Genghis and his army arrived outside the walls early in 1214. Two attempts to storm the city were beaten off. On the first occasion, it seems likely that the Chinese let some of the attackers break through a gate, only to set fire to the street behind them, trapping the Mongols and slaughtering them. Genghis knew when to stop. A truce was called and the Chinese emperor paid over a Jin princess, 500 boys and girls, 3,000 horses and 10,000 liang of gold to get the Mongols to leave.

Genghis almost certainly planned to return and when he heard in July that the emperor Xuanzong had decided to abandon Zhongdu as his capital and move it further south to Kaifeng, he took this as a sign of treachery and sent a large army of Mongols, Khitans and renegade Chinese to blockade the city. Blockade was not a usual Mongol strategy, but in this case it did what Genghis wanted. Xuanzong sent two large relief armies with supplies to break the blockade, but the first was surprised by a Mongol raid and its leader, the drunken Li Ying, was captured along with 1,000 wagons. The second suffered the same fate, ambushed at the River Yongding and destroyed by a much smaller Mongol force. The situation in Zhongdu became critical. One story has it that due to the shortage of stone or metal shot for the cannon in the city, among the first recorded uses of artillery with gunpowder if true, the ammunition was substituted with balls made of melted-down gold and silver. Genghis waited for the defenders and the population to starve. Cannibalism was later reported among both the besieged and the besiegers. The whole Mongol army now invested the city, preventing further supplies for the stricken capital. In late spring, the Jin commanders abandoned the city, Wanyen Fuxing choosing to commit suicide, while the army commander Mojan Chinchung smuggled himself at night through the Mongol lines, only later to be executed by the emperor in Kaifeng.

In June, the abandoned garrison opened the gates and surrendered. Although Genghis had wanted to prevent the usual bloodbath, his angry and impatient soldiers looted the city (this was their only source of payment for military duty) and butchered thousands of the inhabitants, though not as mercilessly as in later sieges – at Urgench in 1220, the entire population would be decapitated and pyramids built of their heads. The capital, with its vast walls, was now a Mongol city, signalling the rapid decline of Jin rule. By 1234, the rest of Jin China was subject to the Mongols. Genghis Khan proved himself a shrewd commander, whether fighting on an open plain or besieging vast cities. According to his published Bilik (Maxims), he saw warfare as the finest of activities: ‘A man’s greatest pleasure is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them that which they possessed.’ Warfare was the breath of life for Genghis Khan, a fact that helps to explain his remorseless pursuit of battle and the single-minded quality of his leadership.

No. 7

BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN 23–24 June 1314

The famous battle in June 1314 at the small river of Bannock Burn, near Stirling in Scotland, was fought between two leaders whose presence on the day made all the difference between victory and defeat. The English army, large and well-trained, should have defeated a Scottish force less than half its size, but its commander-in-chief, King Edward II, chose to flee the field. His opponent, Robert Bruce, who had declared himself King of Scotland in 1306, knew he was at a disadvantage fighting his powerful neighbour in open battle, but he stayed, rallied his men and won a victory that opened the way to full Scottish independence fourteen years later, with a treaty that acknowledged Robert as Scotland’s true king.

The battle came at the end of a long period of almost twenty years of violence between the two kingdoms following the death of the last heir to the Scottish throne in 1290. By the early fourteenth century, the English king, Edward I – ‘the Hammer of the Scots’ – had forced Scotland to submit to English government, but in 1306 Robert Bruce, Earl of Carrick, supported by defiant Scottish noblemen, was chosen as the new King of Scotland and crowned at Scone. He was almost immediately defeated by Edward I. Legend has it that he hid in a cave, where he watched a spider struggling to climb its gossamer thread until it finally reached its goal; this, so it is said, inspired Bruce to return to the fight for a free Scotland. Whether the story is true or not, Bruce was a remarkable military commander and over the seven years that followed Edward I’s death in 1307, he succeeded in retaking many of the English strongholds, including Edinburgh Castle. In the summer of 1313, Bruce’s brother, Edward, agreed with the English commander of Stirling Castle, Sir Philip Mowbray, that if no English army had come to rescue him after exactly one year, the castle would be surrendered to the Scots. This was a challenge the new English king, Edward II, could not ignore. He gathered together a large army, numbering an estimated 18,000 cavalry, archers and foot soldiers, and marched north to restore English rule.

This nineteenth-century engraving shows the Scottish king, Robert Bruce, at the moment when he brought his axe crashing down on the head of the English knight Henry de Bohun at the start of the Battle of Bannockburn, which secured his rule in Scotland.

The English army arrived near Berwick-upon-Tweed on 10 June 1314. Edward was an unpopular king, famous for his male favourites, and five of the eight English earls failed to join him. He nevertheless mustered an impressive military force, led by around 2,500 heavily armed and armoured knights, whose giant warhorses, the destriers, acted like tanks on a modern battlefield. Bruce summoned his supporters to the forest of Tor Wood, close by Stirling Castle; they included perhaps 1,000 men from Argyll and the Scottish islands under Angus Óg MacDonald, and a further 6–7,000 foot soldiers. Bruce had only 500 light cavalry under Sir Robert Keith, Marischal of Scotland, and a body of archers. The Scottish army generally avoided pitched battles against a larger enemy, but on this occasion Bruce, warmly supported by his other commanders and his men, decided that a stand had to be made. The battle tactic of the Scots was simple and thoroughly rehearsed. In front of where Bruce expected the battle to take place, the soldiers dug deep pits almost half a metre in diameter, close together and concealed with grass and twigs. Behind the traps, the army relied on the shield ring or ‘schiltron’, 500 men formed in a tight circle, several deep, with long 16-foot (5-metre) iron-tipped spears pointing outwards and upwards to ward off attacking horsemen. These human fortresses were carefully constructed, the outer ring kneeling, the ring behind with spears at chest height, both designed to stop oncoming horses.

The problem for the Scots was the sheer number of the enemy. On 23 June, one day before Stirling Castle was to be surrendered, Edward moved his vast force north from Falkirk. They arrived at the small river, Bannock Burn, where the Scottish army had been drawn up for battle on New Park, a slope of land beyond the river, which dominated the road to Stirling. The Park had forest behind, through which the Scots could escape, and swampy ground to both the south and east, making a flanking attack by the English difficult. Bruce’s army might nevertheless have succumbed to a frontal assault. Instead the English attacked in the order they arrived, without waiting to assemble a full field of battle. The vanguard under the Earl of Gloucester, seeing what they mistakenly thought was a Scots army withdrawing from an encounter, charged across the pits and swamp. Among those who succeeded in getting across was the young Sir Henry de Bohun. He made straight for Bruce, who was clearly marked out by his golden coronet. Bruce in turn charged on his small grey horse at de Bohun, dodged the lance, and in a deft movement split open de Bohun’s skull with his axe. The vanguard hesitated and withdrew. Another 300 horsemen under Sir Robert Clifford attempted to break through to Stirling Castle, but they were obstructed by a schiltron led by the Earl of Moray. After a vicious engagement, the English again fell back. As dusk fell, Edward ordered his army to set camp.

There was now a marked contrast between the two forces. Bruce’s single-handed combat had inspired his men, who were now eager for the battle. Edward had misjudged the day and among his commanders there was a despondent expectation that their king lacked the flair or will for the contest. A Scottish knight, fighting with Edward, defected to Bruce that night with news that the English were demoralised by what had happened and the king uncertain of his support. On the morning of 24 June, Edward decided to avoid a fight and to move on to Stirling. The way was blocked by the Scots, who marched in formation down New Park to obstruct the only way through. Edward’s commander, the Earl of Gloucester, again preferred battle and charged at the first schiltron before the army was ready. He was among the first unseated and killed. Edward had to turn his army to face the Scots, and as he did so, the other schiltrons entered the fray. The English archers found it difficult to concentrate their fire, and feared by this time hitting their own knights in the back. Bruce ordered Keith to take his 500 horses and disperse the archers while the English knights were locked in combat. He did so effectively, pursuing them into the marshland. The schiltrons held, partly because the swampy ground hemmed in the English and made it difficult to deploy the foot soldiers behind. Then suddenly, at the height of the battle, Bruce led the islanders of Angus Óg MacDonald in a famous charge down the slope towards the English, screaming and waving their iron axes. Edward fled the field of battle to avoid capture, leaving a leaderless army which, scenting disaster, finally turned and ran, whereupon they were hunted down or drowned in the marshy ground. Bannock Burn was awash with the corpses of horses and men, many of them the noblemen who had rallied to Edward’s cause. Bruce and his commanders survived. No accurate account of the numbers killed on either side can be made.

The battle proved decisive. Edward returned several times but was unable to overturn the rule of King Robert Bruce, now firmly ensconced as Scotland’s monarch. Edward II was murdered by his opponents in 1327, and the following year Edward III reached agreement with King Robert confirming Scotland’s independence. The Battle of Bannockburn could so nearly have been an English triumph; but Edward II could not inspire or command his army with the same energy, sympathy and tactical imagination displayed by Robert Bruce.

No. 8

BATTLE OF MOHÁCS 29 August 1526

The role of leadership was an important one at the battle on the plain of Mohács that destroyed the Hungarian king and nobility and opened the way to centuries of Ottoman domination of south-central Europe. But it was a role shared by two very different men: the first was the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman I, scion of the Osmans, later known as the ‘Magnificent’; the second was his grand vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, a young Greek whom Suleiman had met when he was governor of Magnesia. Ibrahim became his close companion and adviser, eating at the sultan’s table, even sharing his tent. The victory over the Hungarians was celebrated as Suleiman’s triumph, but it was sealed by the two men who fought side-by-side that day.

The conflict between Hungary and the Ottoman Empire went back many years, but by the early sixteenth century, Ottoman encroachment had become more insistent. In 1521, Belgrade fell to the sultan and regular raids were carried out further north towards the Danube. Suleiman’s reputation as a military leader to be reckoned with was secured by the capture of the island of Rhodes in 1522, but he then rested on his laurels. In 1525, the elite janissary guard staged a violent protest against the failure to make war again (for they relied on booty to supplement their meagre pay). Suleiman quelled the rebellion, distributed 200,000 ducats to his troops, and sounded the drum of conquest on 1 December 1525, summoning his people to war. He could have moved east against Persia but decided to return to Hungary; he knew that the kingdom was divided politically and that little help was to be expected from the other Christian monarchies of Europe, occupied with the crisis of the Reformation. He was impelled as Sultan to expand the territory of Islam as a step towards achieving a universal monarchy; for him, expansion against the infidel Christians was a sacred obligation.

On 23 April 1526, Suleiman and Ibrahim left Constantinople with 100,000 men and 300 guns. It took almost three months before the cavalcade reached Belgrade. Torrential rain had swollen all the rivers, but Ibrahim pushed ahead to make sure they were bridged. Ibrahim was also trusted to sweep aside the few Hungarian troops still found on the road to the Danube. The fortress of Peterwardein was stormed and the garrison of 500 decapitated on Ibrahim’s orders. The Hungarian forces in the path of the Ottoman army, led by Pál Tömöri, the martial Archbishop of Kalosca, retreated back to the Hungarian plain. Here a waterlogged steppe 10 kilometres (6 miles) wide reached south from the small village of Mohács, ending in a line of tree-covered hills. It was there, on the edge of the plain nearest the village, that the Hungarian King Louis and the cream of Hungarian nobility set up their camp. The final number in the Hungarian force is open to conjecture, but is generally thought to be between 25,000 and 30,000, though reinforcements were arriving from Bohemia, Croatia and Transylvania, totalling perhaps 30,000 more.

As Suleiman’s army drew up among the hills and woods on the far side of the plain of Mohács, the Hungarian nobles pressured the king to fight the battle there and then rather than wait for help. They were confident that the heavy cavalry, armoured man and horse from head to toe, would be able to smash the advancing Turks by a combination of sheer weight and their fiery élan.

The Hungarian tactic was unsophisticated. Suleiman by contrast thought out how best to be certain of victory. The general of the akinci, the light troops and skirmishers, advised the sultan to let his front line bend inwards as the Hungarian heavy cavalry attacked. This would allow strong forces on either side of the curved line to attack the Hungarians on both flanks and eventually to encircle them. Estimates suggest that there were perhaps 45,000 fighting troops with the sultan, both cavalry and foot soldiers, and an unknown number of guns, a balance less uneven than the later Christian accounts suggested. Both armies took time to reach battle stations and the Hungarians, determined to take the offensive, finally charged the Ottoman line in the middle of the afternoon, commanded by the redoubtable Archbishop Tömöri in his golden armour.

A 1588 illustration from an Ottoman manuscript shows the Ottoman cavalry at the Battle of Mohács on 29 August 1526. They pursued and butchered thousands of the fleeing Hungarians as the battle drew to a close.

The battle details vary among contemporary accounts, but the general picture confirms that the Ottoman plan worked almost like clockwork. The Hungarian cavalry charged the first line, commanded by Ibrahim Pasha himself. The Turkish account of the battle, written by the contemporary historian Kemal Pashazade, attributed the victory to the prowess of the vizier, ‘whose lance was like the beak of the falcon in vigour and whose sword, thirsty for blood, was like the claws of the lion of bravery’. Embroidered though the account was, Ibrahim organized the fall-back that created the fatal crescent shape. When King Louis and the reserve saw the Turkish line bend, they eagerly attacked across the plain, expecting victory. They arrived just as the first Hungarian charge, which almost reached Suleiman himself, was spent. The Ottoman cannon opened a murderous fire while the Hungarian horsemen were assailed from both flanks by the light infantry and cavalry clustered around them. The doomed army fought, according to the accounts, bravely but vainly. By evening it was destroyed. Among the slain were three archbishops, five bishops, 500 Hungarian nobles and the king himself, drowned when he tried to escape across the marshy ground. His body was found a month later buried in the mud.

A monument in the Hungarian town of Mohács commemorates the comprehensive defeat of the Hungarian king and army in the Battle on 29 August 1526.

The defeat was comprehensive. Ottoman soldiers took no prisoners, meaning that more than 20,000 Hungarians died that day, tearing the heart out of the Hungarian nation. Ibrahim’s generalship so impressed Suleiman, who had also bravely stood his ground while lances and arrows struck his breastplate, that he presented his vizier with a heron’s feather covered with diamonds as a token of his esteem. On 31 August, Suleiman noted only the following in his diary: ‘The Sultan seated on a throne of gold receives the salutations of the viziers and officers; massacre of two thousand prisoners. Rain falls in torrents.’ The Ottomans proceeded to the Hungarian capital of Buda. Suleiman had not intended it to be sacked, since the citizens had prudently sent him the keys to the city as a sign of supplication, but his troops were eager for booty and hard to control. Buda and Pest, the twin towns of the Hungarian capital, were both burned down and their treasure ransacked. Hungary was left temporarily to its own ruined devices, but three years later southern Hungary came under indirect Ottoman authority. Once again, Ibrahim and Suleiman proved an irresistible partnership, whose leadership inspired and disciplined an army that was otherwise motley, hard to control and greedy for loot.

No. 9

SIEGE OF VIENNA 12 September 1683

The battle that took place outside the Austrian capital of Vienna on 12 September 1683 marked a turning point in the history of European warfare. The victory by a Christian ‘Holy League’ composed of Poles, Germans and Austrians against a huge Ottoman army marked the end of the centuries-long expansion of Ottoman Turkish power in southeastern Europe and saved central European Christianity. After Vienna, the Ottoman sultanate did not inflict serious defeat on Western enemies again, and the Turkish Empire began a long decline.

The Ottomans had long harboured ambitions to capture Vienna and dominate the trade routes of eastern Europe. Buda, in Hungary, was an Ottoman city and to the south the Ottomans ruled as far as present-day Bosnia and Croatia. A restless frontier between the Austrian Habsburg and Ottoman empires ran through northern Hungary. The Ottoman sultan, Mehmed IV, decided on the advice of his grand vizier, Kara Mustafa Pasha, that it was time to launch a major campaign against the Habsburgs and to extend Ottoman suzerainty over the whole area of central Europe. Plans were made to strengthen roads, repair bridges and gather together a large army from among the vassal states of the empire. On 6 August 1682, war was declared on Austria, but the late season postponed the advance of the Ottoman army until the following March. The Habsburgs had plenty of time to prepare defences and seek allies. Emperor Leopold I reached an agreement with the King of Poland-Lithuania, John III Sobieski, for mutual aid in the defence of Christian Europe. This was to prove an inspired choice.

In the early summer, the huge Ottoman army, followed by herds of cattle, flocks of sheep, wagon trains of supplies and thousands of camp followers, moved north from Thrace, reaching Belgrade in May (where the sultan stayed to await results). The army was commanded by the grand vizier himself, who moved northwards to encircle Vienna by 14 July 1683. Leopold and 80,000 Viennese fled westward to Linz to avoid Ottoman conquest, leaving Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg with 16,000 soldiers and militia and 370 cannons to defend Vienna against the siege. For two months, the defenders endured disease, hunger and the constant threat that Turkish engineers would succeed in mining under the walls and blowing a gap in the defences. Kara Mustafa Pasha did nothing to rush the capture of Vienna. Short of heavy artillery, and confident that there was no prospect of relief, he waited until his miners had breached the walls. This long delay allowed the Christian Holy League to mobilize its forces, prepare the campaign and march to the relief of the city.

The Polish-Lithuanian king John III Sobieski (1629–96) arrived at Vienna in September 1683 in time to defeat the besieging Ottoman armies. This print comes from The Gallery of Portraits with Memoirs by Arthur Malkin, published in London in 1833.

The League was made up of 47,000 Germans and Austrians and an army of 37,000 Poles and Lithuanians. King John III Sobieski was the key figure holding the force together. He was a remarkable commander, with a string of earlier victories against Tatars and Ottomans to his credit. He had been responsible for reforming the Polish army to create a modern force. He understood Ottoman military doctrine, having been an envoy in Istanbul, and he could speak all the major Western languages (plus Tatar and Turkish), a big advantage in a multi-national force. On 6 September, his army crossed the Danube and met up with Imperial forces under Charles of Lorraine, but two days later Ottoman miners succeeded in breaching the defensive walls. The Ottoman army was poised to enter the city.

The 85,000 Holy League troops moved into position on the Kahlenberg hills above Vienna and on 12 September they prepared for battle. There has always been some confusion over the exact size of the Ottoman force. The hard core of 20,000 warrior janissaries were supported by as many as 100,000 allied and vassal soldiers, but many were poorly armed or clothed, while the 40,000 Tatars were unreliable. The battle started at 4 a.m. with a spoiling attack by Ottoman forces, which was repulsed by the Austrians and Germans. During the morning, Kara Mustafa Pasha was determined to complete the capture of Vienna. He divided his forces between the city and the threat to the Ottoman rear, a crucial miscalculation. For twelve exhausting hours, the German–Polish infantry launched attacks against the two Ottoman flanks, while at the city walls Ottoman engineers prepared a final explosion to breach the fortifications. Ottoman troops were kept back in readiness to occupy Vienna, but an Austrian miner detected the Turkish explosive and defused it.

Ottoman strategy exposed the army to profound danger. At 5 p.m., John Sobieski gathered the combined cavalry of the relief force together on the hills above the battle. Judging the moment to be right after hours of infantry attrition, he launched the largest cavalry charge in history. Some 20,000 horsemen, including 3,000 of Sobieski’s famed ‘winged hussars’, swept down from the hills. The Ottoman forces, exhausted after fighting all day on the plain and on the walls of Vienna, collapsed in a matter of minutes in the face of this cavalry onslaught. By 5.30 p.m., Sobieski was standing in Kara Mustafa’s magnificent tent. The Turkish armies broke and fled, leaving 15,000 dead and wounded, 5,000 prisoners and the loss of all the Turkish artillery and great quantities of treasure. The Holy League had casualties estimated at 4,500. The victory ended any prospect of an Ottoman central Europe.

John Sobieski famously remarked ‘We came, we saw, God conquered’. Pope Innocent XI declared the feast of the Holy Name of Mary to be celebrated on 12 September throughout Catholic Christendom in commemoration. The Ottoman forces failed to return, and over the next decades Turkish rule was driven back in Hungary and Transylvania. The Habsburg–Ottoman war was finally ended with the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699. On 25 December 1683 in Belgrade, Kara Mustafa Pasha was ritually strangled with a silk rope. John III Sobieski died in 1696, Poland’s most famous king and military commander.

No. 10

BATTLE OF VALMY 20 September 1792

The Battle of Valmy is commonly regarded as the battle that saved the French Revolution. Three years after the overthrow of France’s absolute monarchy in summer 1789, large Austrian and Prussian armies were advancing on Paris to overthrow the revolutionary regime and restore the old social order. The Prussians were met by an army of French levies raised, they were told, to save the new nation and the liberty of its people. In truth the battle was little more than a modest exchange of fire, but the Prussians withdrew and Paris was saved. The revolution entered its more radical phase, and four months later the French king, Louis XVI, was executed.

The horror stories spread abroad by émigré Frenchmen of the violence and depravity of the revolutionary leaders and the mobs they led fuelled the ambition of the crowned heads of Europe to try to extinguish the new system before its seditious infection touched them, too. An army of around 30,000 was gathered together by the Prussian King, Frederick William II, under the command of the Duke of Brunswick, widely regarded as one of the finest commanders in Europe. Alongside some 32,000 Austrians to the north and the south, the Prussian army moved forwards through Luxembourg and eastern France in August and early September, capturing one city after another to reach and cross the River Meuse. In Paris, the fright of invasion sped up the search for counter-revolutionary suspects and the subsequent September Massacres accounted for more than 1,000 grisly deaths, among them priests, aristocrats and a much larger number of common prisoners who were an easy target, but largely guiltless.

The main French force, commanded by General Charles-François Dumouriez, arrived to the west of the river to occupy a ridge of hills and strong points. Dumouriez told the minister of war that he would defend to the death, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, but the first strongpoints soon fell to determined Prussian and Austrian attack. Dumouriez retreated south, where he was joined by 10,600 men under General Pierre de Beurnonville and 16,000 troops brought from Metz by General François-Christophe Kellermann. Brunswick was confident that his well-trained Prussians would sweep aside what he regarded as a revolutionary rabble, but his 30,000 soldiers were now faced by as many as 36,000 French, with 28,000 in reserve some distance away, a half-and-half mixture of veterans from the armed forces of the king and new National Guard levies raised to defend the revolution. Although discipline was lax, and the reliability of former royal officers unpredictable, it was commitment to the new national cause, rather than military spit-and-polish, that shaped the force, just as it had encouraged Washington’s irregulars in America a decade before.

The Prussian king, travelling with Brunswick, insisted that the French would continue to retreat and encouraged him to move forward to cut off their line of escape and destroy them. On the night of 19 September, the Prussians prepared to march. At 6 a.m., the advance guard moved forward through thick rain and fog until, to their consternation, they were shelled by Kellermann’s invisible artillery, drawn up on the slopes of Mont Yron, around which Dumouriez had placed his guns and long lines of infantry, a total front-line force of 36,000 men. The artillery was manned by the old regular army and was regarded as among the most proficient in Europe. The Prussians continued to move forward, more hesitantly now until they had captured the first French guns at the inn of La Lune, where the king and his staff could also shelter. Brunswick then drew up his army in battle array opposite the hills and the village of Valmy, the artillery lined up in front of the 34,000 soldiers he had brought this far. What he lacked was a clear operational plan.

Only when the fog lifted at noon could the Prussians see, not a revolutionary mob, but line upon line of uniformed and disciplined soldiers, well-established at the summit of an awkward slope. He ordered his infantry to form columns and advance against the French line. It was at this moment that Kellermann rose to his role as commander of the revolutionary troops. He stood up in the saddle, placed his hat with its red-white-and-blue cockade on the end of his sword, and, raising it on high, called out ‘Vive la Nation!’ It was the first battle-cry of a new age of national wars. His troops echoed back with cries of ‘Vive la Nation!’ and ‘Vive la France!’ and prepared to fight the Prussians singing the new revolutionary anthem, La Marseillaise. This was war for a modern cause, not to satisfy dynastic ambition.

A statue to the French Marshal François Kellermann stands in the French town of Valmy to commemorate the victory in September 1792 over the Prussians. The statue does not show the hat on top of the sword, which is how the gesture is said to have been made on the day of battle.

The story of Kellermann’s rallying call may have become embellished in the telling, but all witnesses recall it. Whether it was this that perturbed Brunswick, or simply the growing evidence that he was greatly outnumbered by men who could, after all, fight effectively, he hurriedly recalled the columns. An artillery duel continued until dusk when torrential rain brought the desultory conflict to an end. Though no real battle had occurred (300 French casualties, 184 Prussian), Valmy was treated as the first major victory of the revolution. The next day, the monarchy was abolished and the First French Republic proclaimed. Brunswick and Frederick William prudently withdrew back to the Rhineland, leaving the French free to deploy an impressive total of around 450,000 men for adventures in Savoy and Belgium. There were to be more than twenty years of war before the disruptive effects of the new revolutionary order were tempered by defeat and the restoration of a monarchy. The Prussian Carl von Clausewitz, in his reflections On War, saw the revolutionary victory as the start of a new age, in which war became the business of the whole body of citizens: ‘nothing,’ he wrote, ‘now impeded the vigour with which war could be waged.’ Kellermann could not know that his flamboyant gesture, enough to turn the cautious Prussians back, would open the way to total war.

This painting of the Battle of Valmy by the French artist Horace Vernet (1789–1863) was commissioned in the 1820s by the future King Louis-Philippe. The image of the windmill became the standard view of the battlefield, reproduced in numerous prints and pictures commemorating the victory.

No. 11

BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR 21 October 1805

Any visitor to London standing in Trafalgar Square and gazing up at the tall column at its centre may well wonder why the British named such a prominent landmark after a small southern Spanish cape, lapped by the cool Atlantic on the Costa de la Luz. The column supports the slender statue of Admiral Horatio Nelson, almost certainly Britain’s most famous sailor, whose smaller fleet defeated a large Franco-Spanish naval force in a bitter day-long engagement in 1805, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. Even more remarkable for a battle in which leadership played a critical part, Nelson himself was mortally wounded early in the fight and died before it was over.

The battle was in many ways accidental. In the summer of 1805, Napoleon planned the invasion of England across the Channel from Boulogne and Calais. A large army gathered there, but by August it still lacked the naval superiority necessary to give invasion any chance of success. An alliance with Spain earlier in the year might have given Napoleon the large naval force that he needed, but the British naval blockade kept the Franco-Spanish forces divided. When Napoleon ordered Vice Admiral Pierre Villeneuve to gather a fleet together from the scattered units, the best that could be achieved was the safety of the Spanish port of Ferrol and, later, Cádiz. Napoleon flew into a rage at the apparent timidity of his naval commander – ‘What a navy! What an admiral! What useless sacrifices!’ – but the truth was that French and Spanish ships were not fully prepared for combat, many lacking trained men, or in some cases even men who had been to sea. Villeneuve knew that command of the British fleet sent to prevent an invasion force from gathering had been given to Nelson, victor at the battles of the Nile in 1798 and Copenhagen in 1801. Nelson’s reputation preceded him: a shrewd tactician and a brave and aggressive admiral. Unsurprisingly, Villeneuve, and the even less enthusiastic Spanish commander, Admiral Federico Gravina, were reluctant to risk a major battle. When a frustrated Napoleon finally abandoned the invasion, he ordered the combined Franco-Spanish fleet to leave Cádiz for Naples, where it could support the French army preparing for war against a new anti-French Coalition. The Spanish commanders objected to risking a fight and even Villeneuve’s own subordinates hoped that battle could be avoided. The French commander finally persuaded the fleet to leave by arguing that Nelson had only twenty-two ships to the Franco-Spanish force of thirty-three. With a poor wind the ships straggled out of port on 19 October, where Nelson’s advance guard spotted them.

Battle was still not inevitable. Villeneuve was supposed to be heading for Naples, already knowing that he was to be sacked and humiliated by his emperor. The ships made an untidy line towards the Straits of Gibraltar, forcing Nelson to pursue them. He had planned a classic operation in which the long Franco-Spanish line would be pierced by two columns of ships that would then encircle the enemy and destroy them in a ‘pell-mell’ battle. The French attempt to flee to the Mediterranean might mean no such operation was possible. Despite the poor winds, the Franco-Spanish fleet passed Cabo Trafalgar and could see the possibility of safety. All at once, in mid-morning, Villeneuve decided to throw caution to the wind. He ordered the fleet to turn, prepare battle stations and engage with the oncoming British. The manoeuvre was carried out in no particular order and the ships eventually emerged in small groups rather than an ordered line, the northernmost squadron under Rear-Admiral Pierre Dumanoir out of touch with the main area of the battle that followed.

Nelson was delighted with the prospect of battle, but puzzled by the unusual Franco-Spanish battle order. He ordered his two columns to form, one under his command, one under Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood. He ordered an unusually long signal to be hoisted, since immortalized in the Nelson saga: ‘England expects that every man will do his duty.’ The signal provoked roaring cheers from the ships around him. Battle-stations were prepared and at 11.30 a.m. the first British ships sailed for the enemy line. Nelson in Victory finally let the Téméraire enter the fray ahead of him; Collingwood’s Royal Sovereign led the assault further to the west against the end of the enemy line. The British fleet boasted 2,148 guns, including the heavy carronades designed to rake the enemy deck and smash the masts, against 2,568 of the enemy; there were 30,000 sailors and marines in the Franco-Spanish fleet, 17,000 in Nelson’s. But the British ships had commanders with greater experience, gun crews who understood the terrible demands of an artillery duel at sea, and a confidence that the enemy did not possess. When Nelson finally spotted Villeneuve’s flagship Bucentaure, he changed the direction of his charge and under heavy fire from the French ships, steered straight for his opposite number.

A sandstone statue of Admiral Lord Nelson stands atop Nelson’s Column in London’s Trafalgar Square. The 52-metre (169-foot) column was built between 1840 and 1843 to commemorate Nelson’s victories over the French.

The ferocious battle between Victory and the French ships Bucentaure, Redoubtable and Neptune symbolized the whole afternoon of battle and illustrated the impact that Nelson’s courage and determination could have on the rest of his fleet. After taking terrible damage, Nelson pierced the French line and began his own cannonades against the enemy. His conspicuous uniform and his refusal to shelter made him an obvious target for enemy sharpshooters in the French rigging and at 1.25 p.m., he was shot through the shoulder. The bullet pierced his lung and crippled his spine. Nelson died three hours later in the ship’s primitive hospital. The fleet did not know this and fought as he had required them. By the time he died, some fifteen French and Spanish ships had already been captured as prizes, including Villeneuve’s flagship, which he surrendered shortly before Nelson’s death. British gunnery was lethal, particularly at close range, while marines and sailors stayed as far as possible below decks to avoid high casualties. British captains revelled in the ship-on-ship combat that now developed and not a single British ship surrendered, despite exceptional levels of damage, which left one vessel, the Bellisle, with no masts or bowsprit and no longer able to fire a gun. On both sides, masts and rigging crashed to the deck or into the sea. Thunderous cannonades destroyed the sides and decks, while fire directed at decks maimed and killed thousands on board, including the captain of the British ship Mars, whose head was blown off by a shot. In many cases the French or Spanish ships that surrendered had suffered no worse damage than the British ships to which they submitted.

The battle was, as Nelson had hoped, ‘pell-mell’, but it was not a walkover. French and Spanish commanders, though in some cases unhappy about having to fight, gave as good as they got; all except Rear Admiral Dumanoir, whose ten ships took little part in the battle. Had they done so, the outcome might have been different. Some turned back to engage in the fight later in the afternoon, but Dumanoir and four vessels steered on towards Cádiz. They were captured a few days later by another British squadron. By 5.45 p.m., the battle was over, ended spectacularly by the explosion of the French Achille as it was devoured by fire. Collingwood succeeded Nelson as commander and could count nineteen enemy ships captured for the surrender of not a single British vessel. Franco-Spanish losses were 6,953 dead and wounded, while the British suffered just 449 dead, including Nelson, and 1,241 wounded. Most of the nineteen captured ships were lost on passage to Gibraltar in a storm (two escaped). Other French and Spanish ships sank or were captured in the next few days; of the thirty-three combined Franco-Spanish ships, twenty-three were lost and the rest badly damaged. Napoleon raged at news of the defeat, but Villeneuve was now safely a British prisoner.

Trafalgar did not bring the war with Napoleon any closer to a conclusion. French shipyards turned out more vessels to replace those lost, but the balance of power at sea remained with the Royal Navy, an outcome that only in the long run contributed to the eventual collapse of the French Empire. Nelson became the most famous British hero of the nineteenth century, and in 1843 his completed granite column finally gazed out over the capital, its metal friezes fashioned from melted-down French guns captured at Trafalgar.

No. 12

BATTLE OF AUSTERLITZ 2 December 1805

There is perhaps no finer example of Napoleon’s remarkable military genius than the comprehensive defeat he imposed on a numerically superior Russian–Austrian force near the small Austrian town of Austerlitz at the height of the war between France and its allies and the Third Coalition of Britain, Russia and Austria. Napoleon was not diffident about his military reputation. In 1804, he had had himself crowned emperor in what was until then a new revolutionary and republican state; he had little respect for his enemies and great confidence in his capacity to out-think and out-fight them. This confidence was infectious. On the eve of Austerlitz, 1 December 1805, he was almost captured as he went with his guards to reconnoitre. On his return to camp, his troops spontaneously lit straw torches to light his way and struck up a strident chorus of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ With the cries echoing around him, Napoleon was heard to mutter ‘it has been the finest evening of my life’. The following day, the first anniversary of his coronation, was a remarkable triumph for Napoleon and his enthusiastic soldiers.

The victory at Austerlitz came at an opportune moment. Napoleon’s Grande Armée was campaigning in cold winter weather far from France, deep in central Europe, and with the prospect, despite earlier victories, that Prussia might join the war and send a large army southwards. In late October, the British had contributed the decisive naval victory at Trafalgar to the Coalition’s efforts. A large Russian army, personally led into Europe by Tsar Alexander I, was supported by a smaller Austrian force, both approaching from the east. Napoleon needed to be sure that battle would be joined and won; he dispersed his forces to lure the Tsar into thinking that he was weaker than he really was. The bait was swallowed, and although some advisers wanted the Tsar to wait until even more reinforcements were available, he was impatient to impose his mark on European history by vanquishing the undefeated emperor of France. Once it was evident that battle was what the Coalition wanted, Napoleon drew up his main force at a battlefield of his own choosing and summoned the distant armies of Marshal Bernadotte and Marshal Davout to join him. The French would eventually have a mixed French and Italian force of 73,000 (not all of whom would see action) and 139 guns against a Coalition force of 85,700 with 278 guns spread across two or three fronts.

In this nineteenth-century print by an unknown artist of the Battle of Austerlitz on 2 December 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte can be seen on his white horse in the centre of the picture, on top of the Pratzen Plateau, which had been captured from the Austrians during the day.

The site of the battle played an important part in the final outcome. Napoleon chose a narrow plain, the Plain of Turas, positioned between two small branches of a river, with a hilly plateau, the Pratzen, to his right and a good field for cavalry action in front. His inspiration lay not only in choosing a suitable field, but in anticipating what his enemy would do. He expected the Russians and Austrians to try to outflank him by occupying the Pratzen as a base from which to turn the French line by attacking the right wing from the rear. To do this, the Russian army would be stretched out along the few miles of the plateau, itself exposed to a possible counter-thrust, which the French would mount from the plain, cutting the enemy army in two and destroying it. This is exactly what the Russian generals Mikhail Kutuzov and Franz von Weyrother decided to do, though Kutuzov was aware of the risks involved. Expecting the Coalition armies to outnumber Napoleon by perhaps two to one, the object was to keep the French front line occupied by a limited threat, while the rest of the army crept along the plateau and behind the enemy. It was not a poor plan, though it depended on Napoleon not realizing the danger until too late. In fact, Napoleon planned the battle to take exactly this form; holding the front line, keeping a weaker but sufficient force on the right wing, at the end of the plateau, and sending the bulk of his army up the slopes of the plateau to shatter the enemy from the flank.

This engraving of Napoleon Bonaparte by the English engraver D J Pound was published in London in 1860. It shows the French emperor in sombre mood with hand characteristically tucked into his waistcoat.

No battle goes exactly to plan, but in this case Napoleon understood his enemy so well that had he had spies at the Coalition headquarters, set up at the small town of Austerlitz, they could hardly have informed him better. During the night of 1 December, some 56,000 Coalition infantry and a large body of cannon made as secret an advance as they could across the Pratzen plateau. Their objective was to be in position the following morning to attack the French right through the villages of Telnitz and Sokolnitz, then cross onto the Turas Plain where the main French force could be rolled up from behind. The plan went wrong from the start. The cavalry under Prince Lichtenstein had misunderstood its orders and was at the front of the columns moving across the plateau instead of behind it on the cavalry plain. The effort to reverse the movement of men and horses slowed up the advance and meant that early the following morning there were fewer Russians to storm the French right than intended. Somehow, the French and Italians of Davout’s right wing, still waiting for reinforcements on the march to the battle, held up a force five times their size. This was the most risky element of Napoleon’s plan, for if the front here cracked quickly, the enemy might indeed take his forces from the rear. The French defenders and the Russian attackers took heavy casualties and the villages changed hands many times, but the line did not break.

Napoleon’s main army was poised to attack the plateau. Heavy mists meant that the move into position was invisible to the Coalition columns, while the higher plateau was bathed in sunshine, making the enemy entirely visible to the French below. Around 29,000 French troops commanded by Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult suddenly appeared out of the mist, to the consternation of the enemy. The delay caused by the movement of Coalition cavalry meant that more Russians were on the plateau than expected and there were fierce contests to control the heights. But Kutuzov, already wounded, could see what was happening and tried to rescue an imminent disaster. The Russian Imperial Guard, held in reserve near Austerlitz, were sent to drive the French back, but despite savage hand-to-hand fighting, some of it close to where Napoleon, now on the plateau, was directing the battle, the Guard was decimated. At the front line, French cavalry and infantry held back and then repulsed the smaller Russian cavalry forces under Prince Pyotr Bagration, who, seeing the disaster unfolding, retreated in good order. For the 35,000 Russians crammed into the far end of the plateau and still unable to penetrate the French right wing, there was little hope. The battle was effectively won by mid-day, but the fighting on the ridge and in the villages continued; Kutuzov’s order to retreat took four hours to reach the drunken commander, General Frederick Buxhouden, who by mid-morning was too intoxicated to understand anything. The Russians began retreating while bombarded by French cannon and attacked from the rear. Thousands tried to cross the frozen Satschen Lake, hauling cannon across, until the ice broke. Several hundred drowned, the guns were lost and thousands more dragged themselves, frozen and exhausted, onto the muddy banks, to be slaughtered or captured by the French.

This was a classic victory and Napoleon savoured the moment. Tsar Alexander burst into tears when the disaster was over. The Coalition remnants retreated, but the French army was too exhausted by the contest to pursue them. The Coalition losses have been estimated at 27,000 dead, wounded and captured, though precise Russian figures are lacking; French losses were 1,305 dead, 6,940 wounded and 573 prisoners. This was Napoleon’s finest battle, a testament to his strategic intuition and charismatic example.

No. 13

BATTLE OF MAIPÚ 5 April 1818

‘This battle,’ announced General José de San Martín to his troops shortly before the fight at Maipú, ‘is going to decide the fate of all America.’ This was a grandiose claim for a battle involving no more than a few thousand men in the remote Latin American territory of Chile, but San Martín – ‘the Liberator’ – was about to defeat the last attempt by the Spanish Empire to retain its grip on the country. Defeat would mean the re-imposition of Spanish rule; victory would send a message to Madrid that Latin America was going to free itself entirely from European rule, just as the United States had done some forty years earlier.

The outcome of the battle rested almost entirely on the organizational and strategic qualities of the commander of the army of liberation (known formally as the Army of the Andes), which San Martín had brought to Chile more than two years before with 5,000 soldiers and horsemen and 9,000 pack animals. He was an unusual liberator. Born to a Spanish family in a remote part of what is now Argentina, San Martín was sent back to Spain where he became a colonel of cavalry in the Spanish army, fighting in north Africa and then against Napoleon in the Peninsular War. He was strongly influenced by enlightenment ideas, but remained a political conservative in favour of monarchy. The crisis caused by Napoleon’s invasion and the overthrow of the Spanish crown encouraged San Martín to return to the country of his birth in 1812, two years after a revolt in Buenos Aires against rule from Spain. He formed a lasting commitment to the cause of political independence for the states and provinces of South America. San Martín joined the fledgling Argentine army as a colonel of grenadiers and spent the next two years imposing on a ramshackle military organization the principles of discipline, loyalty and sound training. He was a commanding personality: upright, honest, efficient and committed entirely to his conception of a ‘Continental Plan’ to free all America from colonial oppression.

San Martín’s tough stance on military reform and his growing reputation provoked plots and jealous rivalries. Yet nothing stopped his plan to create a new Army of the Andes in Mendoza, capital of Cuyo province, within striking distance across the mountain chain from the Spanish colony of Chile, struggling for its independence under General Bernardo O’Higgins, son of an Irish-Spanish official. In February 1817, San Martín brought his army of men, better trained and equipped than any rival force, across the high passes of the Andes, along narrow defiles and in bitter cold. Arriving on the other side, his army immediately inflicted a heavy defeat on the Spanish Chilean army at Chacabuco, killing 600 for the loss of only 12 men.

The Spanish retreated south, while San Martín entered the capital, Santiago, and established Chilean rule. The Spanish forces in the far south were neglected. Reinforcements arrived by sea under General Manuel Osorio and in spring 1818, 4,600 troops moved north to try to restore Spanish rule. O’Higgins’s army was caught and beaten as it tried to retreat, and the Spanish now bore down on Santiago, intent on a savage retribution for the insurrectionary insolence of the Chileans.

A painting of the liberator José de San Martín hangs in the National Historical Museum in Buenos Aires, Argentina. San Martín was born in Argentina of Spanish parentage, but is famous for liberating Latin America from the Spanish Empire.

San Martín’s greatest victory came on a clear April day near the town of Maipú, north of the River Maipo on the approaches to Santiago. He drew up his mixed force of around 5,400 cavalry and infantry (many of them freed black slaves), with cavalry on the extreme right, infantry at the centre and left and a reserve of horse behind them. His favourite battlefield tactic was to imitate Alexander the Great, swinging the cavalry on his right in an oblique attack against the enemy left while part of his reserve came round to attack the rear. After charging several times, the grenadiers broke the Spanish left, but the right held firm against San Martín’s infantry, inflicting heavy losses. He ordered three battalions of the reserve to charge the Spanish regiments and they, too, collapsed in confusion. Osorio fled from the battle.

Surrounded on all sides, the Spanish soldiers fought bravely in the face of heavy fire from the twenty-one Chilean cannon and relentless pressure from the enemy infantry. As resistance crumbled, they were massacred where they stood or taken prisoner. Little effort was made to prevent the foot soldiers in the army of liberation from exacting revenge on an army identified with years of local atrocities against the ‘patriots’ fighting for independence. Of the Spanish army, 2,000 were killed and more than 2,000 taken prisoner. The Army of the Andes suffered an estimated 1,000 casualties.

San Martín’s achievement was not simply to out-fight the Spanish army and free Chile from colonial rule. It lay above all in his decision to create a force from the ground up capable of fighting like a European army. With few weapons and fewer clothes, the handful of fighters he had found in Mendoza were transformed, with new uniforms, guns forged in an arsenal created by a Chilean armourer, and gunpowder produced from local saltpetre. Training was strict and discipline harsh, but San Martín earned the confidence of his army by example. His only weakness was hesitancy when faced with the unpredictable and devious world of Latin American politics. His desire to free America as a whole was an ideal that could inspire temporary loyalty but not a permanent trust. Four years after Maipú, he resigned in disillusionment from command of the army and government of Peru (only half of which he had succeeded in liberating), the victim of malign gossip and political hostility. He sailed to Europe as an exile in 1824 and died in Boulogne in 1850. Before his death in 1850, Chile had woken up to its debt to his military talent and offered him the rank and pay of a Chilean general, while the rest of independent Latin America came to see him as their hero too.

No. 14

BATTLE OF VOLTURNO 1–2 October 1860

Probably no military leader was so admired and lionized in his own day as the commander of the famous ‘Thousand’ redshirts, Giuseppe Garibaldi. His inspirational leadership was acclaimed by those volunteers who flocked to his call to create a united Italy, but feared and vilified by politicians and monarchists who understood the revolutionary potential of Garibaldi’s ‘people’s army’. The story of the expedition of the Thousand to free Sicily and southern Italy from the rule of their authoritarian Bourbon monarchy is one packed with drama, but nothing was more dramatic than the first and only major defensive battle fought by the Garibaldini along the south bank of the River Volturno, north of Naples.

The campaign that ended with Volturno had begun on 11 May 1860, when the Piemonte and Lombardo, two ships appropriated by Garibaldi in Genoa, arrived at the Sicilian port of Marsala with 1,217 patriots, revolutionaries and students on board. His force faced a Bourbon army numbering 140,000, of whom 25,000 were in Sicily. The odds meant little to Garibaldi. Supported by a flood of volunteers and Sicilians hostile to Bourbon rule, the Thousand had turned by August into a motley force of 20,000. Among them were British and Hungarian veterans keen to support the aspirations for a united Italy and hostile to those great powers, principally the Austrian and Russian empires, which sought to shore up conservative monarchy. The Bourbon king, Francis II, had mixed loyalty from his Neapolitan army, many of whom threw in their lot with Garibaldi over the course of the year. Sicily was overrun and on 19 August, Garibaldi crossed to the mainland at Melito in two old steamers, Torino and Franklin, the latter flying an American flag. He brought 4,200 with him to start a campaign against 17,200 Neapolitan soldiers and 32 cannon.

The expedition was not approved by any of the European powers except Britain. Even the northern Italians, now unified under Victor Emmanuel II thanks to the help of the French army, were wary of Garibaldi and hoped that his ships might founder or sink. Instead, the numbers flocking to join the Garibaldini grew rapidly, though out of the 50,000 in the south no more than half constituted a real fighting force. The Neapolitan army was quickly cleared from Calabria and Garibaldi marched on Naples, the Bourbon capital. As enemy soldiers surrendered, so the rifles and cannon fell into the hands of what was now called the Army of the South, organized like a regular army in divisions and brigades, but reliant for its supply on what it could capture or the money and equipment sent by romantic supporters of Italian freedom. As the Garibaldini moved north, Victor Emmanuel moved his army south through central Italy in the hope that he could prevent Garibaldi from provoking republican revolution. Francis II was caught between the two, but it was the irregulars of Garibaldi who defeated him and made unification possible.

Francis abandoned Naples and moved a little further north to the strongly fortified centres at Capua and Gaeta, where he determined to make a stand. He still commanded 50,000 men with 42 cannon and a body of cavalry, but only half were sent to the front line established along the River Volturno under the command of Marshal Giosuè Ritucci. Garibaldi’s army began to arrive on the south side of the river, and thinking there would be the same uncontested advances seen in Calabria and much of Sicily, István Türr, Garibaldi’s Hungarian commander, launched premature attacks towards Capua. Here and at Caiazzo the Garibaldini were driven back with heavy losses. Francis and Ritucci decided their army was now in a strong enough state to mount a general offensive. The Neapolitan plan was to attack across the river from three different directions, one division from the northwest and two from different points to the east, in the hope that they could surround and annihilate Garibaldi’s army. Garibaldi and his senior commander, Giuseppe Sirtori, were forced to spread out their defensive system to avoid being outflanked. What followed were three different contests that eventually merged into a single battle.

A nineteenth-century image of the Battle of Volturno in October 1860 shows Garibaldi’s red-shirted Italian patriots driving the Neapolitan army to the far side of the aqueduct of Ponte della Valle. The victory brought Italian national unification a decisive step nearer.

Both sides fought, according to observers, with a ferocity and desperation that had been lacking in many of the earlier engagements. Much rose and fell on the outcome. The end of Bourbon rule was certain in the event of a defeat, but a victory for Francis would destroy the momentum for unification and postpone it, perhaps for years. The attack began at dawn on 1 October with a frontal assault on the two major outposts of the Garibaldini at Sant’Angelo and the village of Santa Maria. Good progress was made at first and Garibaldi, who exposed himself time and again to the greatest danger, hurried to Sant’Angelo to try to stem the tide. He was surrounded by the enemy, but rescued almost at once by a group of his own men. He rallied some of the retreating units and with banners flying and sword in hand, if the later images are to be believed, Garibaldi led the counter-attack, smashing the Neapolitan lines. He then rushed to Santa Maria where Giacomo Medici was leading a desperate defence against determined enemy assaults. Again Garibaldi saved the day. He ordered the reserve under Türr to come by train the few miles to the village. Led by the ferocious charge of the Hungarian Hussars, they drove the Bourbon army back to the walls of Capua.

The other axes of advance also went the way of the Neapolitans to begin with. Two columns from the east swept towards Caserta, the main city and road junction. On the right of the line of Garibaldini, a division commanded by Nino Bixio first absorbed the attack, then drove the enemy back in disorder. The central column was more successful and soon reached and occupied Caserta Vecchia. After hours of fighting, the exhausted Neapolitans, unaware of the defeats elsewhere, slept in and around the small town. Sirtori ordered those units that had seen the least fighting to assemble during the night for an attack on the unwary Neapolitans. Early in the morning they woke to gunfire and the sound of the approaching enemy. The 3,000 men were surrounded and either killed or captured. The battle was over. Garibaldi and his thousands had made possible the creation of a new Italy, for the death or injury of 1,634 of his men against the 1,128 casualties and 2,160 prisoners suffered by his enemy.

Garibaldi was essential to the victory, not only for his capacity to outthink the professional officers he opposed, but for his courageous and conspicuous presence at all points of a wide and dangerous battlefield. Nevertheless, Victor Emmanuel refused on his arrival to review the Garibaldini, unable to embrace the idea that patriotic irregulars and foreign volunteers alone could have secured victory. Disillusioned, Garibaldi abandoned his army and departed for his home at Caprera carrying, it is alleged, a year’s supply of macaroni. ‘You have done much,’ he told his men, ‘with scant means in a short time’ – a fitting epitaph for an unpredictable adventure against seemingly invincible odds, and a modest assessment of his own charismatic contribution.

No. 15

BATTLE FOR WARSAW 13–20 August 1920

There are few more obvious examples of the importance of leadership in the history of modern war than the story of Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s rout of the Red Army before the gates of Warsaw in the summer of 1920. What made the battle all the more extraordinary was the curious blend of old and new. There were pitched engagements between cavalry units with lance and sabre; the progress of the Red cavalry was marked by a level of violence towards the troops and populations in its path that resembled the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth century; but there were primitive tanks, armoured trains and a handful of aircraft to show that this was also a conflict of the twentieth.

Piłsudski was a remarkable individual. Born in 1867 in a Poland divided between Russia, Prussia and Austria, he spent thirty years campaigning for Polish independence as a clandestine terrorist. Before the war, he organized a Polish armed force with 20,000 volunteers, known as the Legion. When war broke out that summer, the Austrian army recruited the Legion to fight against Russia and when the war ended, these experienced legionaries formed the core of a new Polish army under Piłsudski’s command. Their job was to build a new Polish state with their commander as its first president. The victorious Allies were willing to recognize Poland’s right at last to independence, but they had no means to help the infant state in case of any threat. Germany was temporarily immobilized by defeat, but revolutionary Russia, struggling under Lenin to defeat its many anti-communist enemies, was an unknown quantity.

The Bolshevik leaders in Moscow had grandiose ambitions. The gradual defeat of the White armies in the Russian Civil War paved the way for a revolutionary crusade into Europe. In February 1920, Lenin ordered a war against Poland as the first stage in the possible ‘liberation’ of the workers and peasants of eastern and central Europe. There was talk of sweeping through to Germany and Italy; world revolution seemed within the grasp of the new Red Army. The Soviet troops were commanded by a spirited commander, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a young Russian soldier who had been a prisoner-of-war for most of the First World War but who was nevertheless trusted by the Red Army commander, Leon Trotsky, to organize and lead whole armies. By chance, both Tukhachevsky and Piłsudski were avid readers of Napoleon; it was the Pole, however, who drew the better lessons.

This colour lithograph of the Polish commander at the defence of Warsaw in 1920, Marshal Jósef Pilsudski, was made by the Polish-Jewish artist Arthur Szyk (1894–1951), who served as a cavalry officer during the Polish-Soviet war. Pilsudski went on to become prime minister of Poland in 1926 while Szyk moved to live and work in Paris in 1921.

In April, the new Polish army, a hotch-potch of units from the Great War and volunteer patriots, undertook a pre-emptive strike against the Red Army in Ukraine and Belorussia. It failed to achieve anything decisive, and in May a Russian counter-offensive pushed the Poles back rapidly. Two large army groups were formed: one in the north striking from Belorussia; one in the south made up of cavalry, the Konarmia, under the swashbuckling horseman, Semyon Budionny, which swept like a Tatar horde against the Poles, driving them back towards Lvov, though suffering heavy losses in the process. On 29 May, Budionny’s Cossacks met the Polish 1st Krechowiecki Lancers and an old-fashioned encounter took place between a champion chosen from each side. The two men rode at each other, but the Polish lancer was quicker, slashing his opponent open from the neck to the waist. The Cossacks turned and fled.

In the north, an even more terrifying army of horsemen was formed under Gaia Bzhishkian, nicknamed Gai Khan because of his reputation for exceptional savagery. His army, known as the Konkorpus III, was composed of Circassian cavalry from the Caucasus, more used to sabres than rifles. By July, the Red Army had crossed the River Bug and was bearing down on Warsaw, spearheaded by Gai’s terrifying vanguard. Confidence rose in Moscow. A provisional communist government was formed; Lenin expected Tukhachevsky to enter the Polish capital in early August 1920 and declare a communist Poland.

Polish forces were short of equipment – even boots and uniforms – and spent much of the summer retreating in haste before the apparently unstoppable Red Army, whose reputation for rape, pillage and slaughter preceded them; Polish villagers fled west, while Polish soldiers lost the will to defend themselves. On 8 August, the Russian armies were ordered to seize Warsaw, 30 kilometres (20 miles) from the Russian lines. There were around 68,000 Poles facing two Russian army groups of between 100,000 and 130,000. Both sides were exhausted and short of materiel after the long summer’s fighting, but the Polish position seemed hopeless. Warsaw was filled with a mood of panic. On 5 August, Piłsudski locked himself away in a room in the Belvedere Palace in the capital to think out a way to snatch victory from the jaws of imminent defeat.

His solution was exceptionally daring. He planned to leave weaker forces in front of Warsaw under the overall command of General Józef Haller, while using the armies of the southern Polish wing to swing north to strike the Russian armies an unexpected and annihilating blow in the flank and rear. If it worked, victory was possible; if it failed, Warsaw would be taken anyway. Having organized the defence of Warsaw, Piłsudski headed south where he reviewed all his troops, instilling in them at last a belief in the possibility that the Russian onrush could be halted. This tall, tough, rough-hewn man, with dark bushy brows and a large military moustache, was an inspiration to the dispirited soldiers around him and he posed the chief obstacle between Tukhachevsky and a quick victory.

The Russian armies began the assault on Warsaw on 13 August. There were problems with the Red Army, too. The long supply line back to Belorussia left units short of ammunition and reserves; most soldiers were barefoot, fighting in rags or a jumble of borrowed clothing. They were bullied by political commissars and sustained only by the promise of loot and women. Tukhachevsky had expected to be supported by the Konarmia in the south, but Budionny’s advance had stalled from exhaustion, and the Moscow representative on the southern front, the young Joseph Stalin, refused to release any forces to help against Warsaw. In addition, Gai’s army of horsemen were sent west to bypass Warsaw and reach the German frontier, leaving Russian armies short of cavalry. Gai’s force cut a swathe of terror through the Polish countryside and was at the German frontier within days, but they were not available for the decisive battle. The Poles were, nevertheless, heavily outnumbered. Piłsudski had received poor intelligence on the whereabouts of the main Russian forces and had not realized that so many were deployed in the north. The 5th Polish Army under General Władisław Sikorski fought a bitter three-day battle for the line of the River Wkra, yielding, then counter-attacking against the main Russian force. The Poles found a new heart and their defence against the encirclement and capture of Warsaw made Piłsudski’s plan all the more likely to work.

On 16 August, a day earlier than planned, the Polish armies from the southern wing rolled forwards against the Russian flank. The main Russian weight was in the north, so Piłsudski’s forces made rapid progress. His 53,000 infantry and 4,000 cavalry reached the Warsaw battle by 17 August and the following day crashed into the side and rear of the attacking Russian force. The Russian 16th Army disintegrated in panic. Tukhachevsky knew little of what was happening because radio communications had been jammed by the Poles. He ordered a new front to be formed, unaware that his armies were now in full retreat, trying to avoid the trap set by the oncoming Polish army in their rear. By 20 August, he finally realized the situation and ordered a general retreat, but it was too late. The Red Army moved east in complete disorder, intercepted by Polish forces moving at right angles to them every few miles. The Poles reached the German and Lithuanian border, wheeled east and pursued the Red Army past Minsk and almost to Kiev. Gai’s savage horsemen, cut off and harried by the Poles, escaped into East Prussia, where they were disarmed and interned by German troops, who had been warily watching his progress. On 15 October, Lenin’s government was forced to seek an armistice.

The Battle for Warsaw depended for its outcome entirely on the success of Piłsudski’s operational inspiration and bold leadership. An ability to act opportunistically, even in the face of uncertain risks, had strong echoes of Napoleon at his best. Victory did not depend on the modern armoury of aircraft, tanks and radio, but relied a great deal on the simplicity and speed of the Polish counter-strike, and on the patriotic fervour of the embattled Polish divisions; this meant literally a matter of life or death for them and for a new national Poland. Nineteen years later when it was the German turn to attack, the armoury of Blitzkrieg condemned the Poles to the rapid loss of Warsaw and showed what a modern war of manoeuvre could achieve. Piłsudski became Poland’s hero and died in 1935, four years before the new war; Tukhachevsky was eventually arrested and executed on Stalin’s orders in June 1937, a long revenge for the failure at Warsaw.

No. 16

THIRD BATTLE OF KHARKOV 19 February – 15 March 1943

German Field Marshal Erich von Manstein titled his memoirs, published in 1955, Lost Victories. This was not an ironic title, for Manstein believed that with the right supreme commander, Germany might not have lost the war nor have squandered the successes he had managed to achieve for Hitler. Both during and after the war, his enemies agreed that Manstein was the finest operational commander the German army possessed. Those qualities were displayed on numerous occasions, but no battle displayed them quite as fully as the sudden German counter-offensive in February 1943 after months of retreating, when Manstein’s panzer armies recaptured the Russian city of Kharkov and won back a large swathe of southern Russian territory against a surprised Red Army. This was perhaps the most poignant of those ‘lost victories’, for within months the German army was again in full retreat, never again to win a clear-cut battle.

Field Marshal Erich von Manstein (1887–1973) was born Erich von Lewinski, but changed his name when he was adopted by the von Manstein family. He became Germany’s most celebrated Second World War general, but had a difficult relationship with his supreme commander, Adolf Hitler.

Manstein was a tough, resolute, perceptive commander who flourished on manoeuvre warfare. He took risks, but won dividends. Best known for his contribution to the operational plan that destroyed the Franco-British front in 1940, Manstein had a professional confidence in what he did that contrasted sharply with his inexperienced supreme commander. Both men found it difficult to give way once they had arrived at a decision. The leadership that Manstein displayed in what came to be called the Third Battle of Kharkov (the city had changed hands twice in the 1941–42 campaigns) was not simply that he understood the nature of the crisis facing his Army Group South after the retreat from Stalingrad and how it might be reversed, but in the fact that he had to argue his case against a sceptical and obstructive supreme commander.

A crisis loomed in late January 1943, as large Soviet forces from the Voronezh Front pushed into a gap that had opened up between Army Group Centre and Army Group Don (renamed South on 12 February). If successful, the Red Army might advance to the Black Sea and encircle the defending German armies in the south. Though Manstein asked for more reinforcements from static sections of the German-Soviet front further north, none arrived. The Red Army recaptured Kursk and Belgorod and by mid-February was pushing into the Ukrainian capital of Kharkov. The commander of the SS panzer divisions holding the city disobeyed Hitler’s orders to hold fast and slipped out of the noose. He was sacked and replaced by General Werner Kempf, a successful tank commander.

In his memoirs, Manstein recalled that grim though his position looked, he could see the germ of an idea to reverse the situation. Both armies were exhausted, with many Soviet divisions down to only a few thousand men and limited numbers of tanks; German divisions, too, were fighting with a fraction of the tanks and armour they needed, but there were still panzer units available to him in the 1st and 4th Panzer Armies and the Army Detachment Kempf further north. The 4th Air Fleet, under General Wolfram von Richthofen, was also strengthened with up to 1,000 aircraft for the operation. Manstein’s idea was to use the available armour to attack the long flank of the Soviet advance from north and south, then push on to retake the Kharkov area. The critical issue was to persuade Hitler that his plan would work. On 17 February, Hitler arrived at Manstein’s southern headquarters at Zaporozhe on the River Dnepr, in southern Ukraine. For three days they argued about Manstein’s plan and the future of the southern front. Hitler feared the coming of the rainy season, the rasputitsa, which might halt the whole plan; he wanted Kharkov recaptured first on grounds of prestige; he almost certainly wanted his view to prevail over Manstein’s for political reasons. After two days, Hitler finally agreed that the ‘defensive-offensive’ Manstein proposed could take place, though he insisted that Kharkov should be retaken. The morning of his flight back to his headquarters, a unit of Soviet tanks moved up the road towards the airport, and Hitler was flown off just 30 kilometres (20 miles) away from the nearest Russians.

The tanks near Zaporozhe stopped because they ran out of fuel. This was the furthest the Soviet offensive came. On 19 February, Manstein’s plan went into operation. The extended Soviet armies, short of supplies and taking heavy losses, crumbled in a matter of days, pushed back by the 4th Panzer Army northwards towards Kharkov or into the German net. By 2 March, the German units counted 23,000 Soviet dead, 615 captured tanks and 9,000 prisoners. The next blow was struck north towards Kharkov itself. Manstein wanted the SS panzer divisions under the command of Lieutenant General Paul ‘Papa’ Hausser (nicknamed as father of the Waffen-SS) to drive west of Kharkov and encircle it from the north. He did not want to risk a second Stalingrad in the ruined streets of the city. But Hausser ignored the instructions and sent his three SS panzer divisions, Totenkopf, Das Reich and Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, directly into the city from three directions. Manstein thought he had done it to find favour with Hitler, but his Stalingrad fear proved misplaced and by 14 March the last pockets of Soviet resistance in the city were snuffed out. Hitler visited Manstein’s headquarters again on 10 March with victory in the battle assured. When he returned to Berlin, Hitler characteristically gave the impression that he had been the author of the success. Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief, noted in his diary: ‘the Führer is very happy that he has succeeded in closing the front again’.

Dead Soviet troops lie among wrecked army vehicles in the ruined city of Kharkov, captured by the German Army in March 1943 after a lightning counter-attack orchestrated by Field Marshal Erich von Manstein.

The battle was a triumph for Manstein’s sense of where and when to strike to maximize the impact even of weakened forces and the defensive-offensive, risky though it was if the rains had started early, probably postponed the Soviet victory on the Eastern Front by anything from six months to a year. It was his last ‘lost victory’. The subsequent Battle of Kursk was lost despite Manstein, who had urged an earlier start before the Russians were dug in, but this time found Hitler adamantly against the idea. Time and again, Manstein recommended that Hitler should appoint a commander-in-chief in the Eastto ease his burden as supreme commander. He suggested it in February 1943 and again in September. In March 1944, Hitler had finally had enough and Manstein was sacked. Western commanders were keen to learn after the war was over how Manstein had succeeded at all, given the obstacles presented by Hitler, and he proved more than willing to oblige. Implicit in all he wrote is the belief that the war might have gone very differently under his high command. More recently, his record has been sullied by evidence of his endorsement of or indifference towards the many atrocities committed in the regions under his command in the East.

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