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NATIONS IN ARMS
FIVE ARMIES THAT MADE EUROPE
By Barney White-Spunner
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In the opening chapter of this absorbing book, the author asks what an army is and defines it essentially as a tribal or village collective to defend itself against existential threats. When applied to a modern nation state, the purpose of an army remains defensive with the proviso that ‘every member of that state should in some way contribute’.
The premise behind this book is that much as the fundamentals of warfare have not changed over the last two millennia, the fundamentals of how a society defends itself and organizes its army have not changed much either. Some get it right; others get it wrong.
Five armies are selected as examples of those who have successfully met the challenges they confronted, not just as victors on the battlefield but also in defending the long-term interests of their societies. Each ‘made Europe’.
Flavius Valerius Constantine, Constantine the Great, opens the batting. It is an eclectic choice for although he was a soldier by default, he was a politician by instinct. After the chaotic succession on the abdication of Diocletian in 305 which resulted in a triumvirate of Emperors, he realized that only internal political unity could hold the Empire together. With this in mind, after reorganizing his own army, he set off to Italy to deal with Maxentius whom he defeated at the battle of the Milvian Bridge.
Now the unchallenged master of Europe, Constantine temporarily shed his military skin and set himself up as the protector of his Christian subjects, a key building block for internal political unity. His first act was give Pope Miltiades an old Laterani Palace – it remains the property of the Vatican to this day - and then, at his own expense, commissioned the construction of the Basilica of St John Lateran. Both gestures went down well.
It was not long before he was back in uniform to deal with Licinius, the third member of the triumvirate. Although they had come to an agreement at the Edict of Milan in 313, they had soon fallen out and after a ten-year war, Licinius was captured and executed. Constantine was now the sole ruler of the Empire and its commander-in-chief.
In 326, he moved his capital to the old Greek town of Byzantium on the shores of the Bosphorus. It was the final act of his vision of unity for the location of Nova Roma, as he called it, was the mandorla where Roman and Greek Christianity met. Constantine understood this as evidenced by his convocation of the first Ecumenical Council of the Christian Church at Nicaea in 325. Despite his rudimentary Greek, he personally presided over the debate for if there was to be one Empire, there could only be one church.
It was Constantine himself who proposed the word homoousios meaning ‘of one substance’ to describe the relation of the Son to the Father but ‘only in its divine and mystical sense’. In other words, it could mean precisely what anyone chose it to mean. The Arian heresy petered out.
Constantine’s Eastern Empire would last for another 1,123 years until 21-year-old Mehmet II, the author’s second subject, pitched his tent in front of the walls of Constantinople on 5th April 1453. By now the Byzantine Empire had been in decline for several centuries. One pivotal event had been the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 when the Emperor Romanus Diogenes and his army were defeated by Alp Aslan’s Seljuk Turks. The loss of Anatolia meant that the army no longer had access to its main recruiting grounds and from thereon it was never a serious military force.
A more invidious event had occurred in 1054 when the division between the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christianity was institutionalized. The ensuing religio-political fault line was to define relations between Western and Eastern Rome and when the Seljuk Turks captured the Holy Land, the seven crusades mounted by the West accentuated the division.
The arch villains were the Fourth Crusaders. Assembled by Byzantium’s enemies, the Pope, the Norman Kings of the Two Sicilies and the Venetians, after leaving Venice in late 1202 they supported a plot to install a new Emperor who would reunify the two churches under Rome. On 9th April 1204, they sacked Constantinople, installed a Latin Emperor and sent the Byzantines into exile for the 56 years. These were dark days indeed for Byzantium.
By the time Mehmet II summoned his ministers to Adrianople in January 1453, much of the military heavy lifting to reduce the ability of the Byzantines to defend themselves had already been carried out by Sultans Orban I and Murad II. The wizened Empire now consisted of Constantinople in a small enclave on the Western shore of the Bosphorus, Trebizond, the Peloponnese, Attica, Euboea and a slab of Epirus. Mehmet’s destiny was to complete the final destruction of the city and it did not take long for his 80,000 soldiers together with their formidable artillery to overpower the 7,000 isolated defenders.
Did Mehmet II and his army ‘make Europe’? Stefan cel Mare of Moldavia with his citizen army and Janos Hunyadi of Hungary both thwarted him, the latter delaying the Ottoman invasion of Hungary by some 60 years. However, Mehmet did succeed in devouring by force of arms Serbia in 1459, the Peloponnese in 1460, Trebizond in 1461, and Bosnia in 1463. Maybe Charlemagne and his army would have made a better subject for ‘Made Europe’ rather than Mehmet the man who ‘Ate the Balkans’!
It's initially puzzling to see how Cromwell’s New Model Army of 1645 fits the ‘Made Europe’ brief. After the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660, Monck’s remustered soldiers and Charles II’s ‘King’s Guards and Garrisons’ were combined to form the new English army, the first ever British peacetime standing army. These troops were soon deployed to garrison new colonies like Tangier which had become an English possession through the dowry of Catherine of Braganza.
In 1662, a 3,000-strong brigade was sent to Portugal to assist Catherine’s brother Alfonso VI in his long-running fight against Spain. Under the command of a German soldier of fortune, Friedrich von Schönberg, the brigade was instrumental in the defeat of Spanish forces at Ameixial and Monte Claros. Only 800 returned.
Twenty-eight years later, all is revealed when the Army of 1661 had its first chance to engage with a European peer group enemy during the Nine Years War. It earned itself a well-deserved reputation for discipline and courage which Marlborough went on to magnify during the War of the Spanish Succession.
Fast forward to Prussia in 1806, the next choice of the author, when the Prussian army was trounced by Napoleon, a story which had started at the Treaty of Westphalia. With a large estate to defend and aware that mercenaries had proved unreliable, Frederick William I, Elector of Brandenburg and later Duke of Prussia, decided to form a home-grown army that would be answerable to him alone. His main objective was to rid Brandenburg of the occupying Swedes. By 1697 he had succeeded.
The next Elector to take on the mantle of reforming the Prussian army was his grandson King Frederick William I in 1713. Although Prussia faced no immediate threat, he increased the size of the army from 35,000 to 80,000 and started a Cadet Academy in Berlin. Concurrent with this expansion, he developed Prussia’s defence industry to make it self-reliant.
It was this organisation which Frederick the Great inherited in 1740 and used in scores of wars to expand Prussian territory at the expense of the Habsburgs and Saxony. As the author points out, the flaw in this army which otherwise ticked all the boxes lay in its domination by a single man, a soldier-king bent on expansion.
On his death, Prussian territorial ambitions became dormant and the army found itself preserved in the aspic jelly of the tactics of the Seven Years War. It was to be another 43 years before it took to the field again; this time the average age of its junior officers was 50. No surprise then that Napoleon made short work of the 247,000 Prussian army at Jena and Auerstedt and by late October 1806, the French had occupied Berlin where they stayed for 8 years.
Out of this political and military humiliation emerged a new Prussian military establishment mentored by Johann Von Scharnhorst and Carl von Clausewitz. Tried and tested in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Federick’s reinvigorated German military machine was to have a devastating impact in the 20th century when the army and the state inextricably became one.
The last army to come under the author’s microscope and the most accessible in the context of today is the US Army of 1941. In April 1917 when the US Congress voted for war against Germany, three problems had to be overcome in order to create an American Expeditionary Force (AEF). How to find the officers to lead it; how to populate it with sufficient numbers: and how to gear up American industry for war.
In short order, General Pershing, an experienced combat soldier, was put in charge of the AEF and conscription introduced. The industrial equation proved harder to crack: by August 1918, the AEF had a tank corps of 2,400 men but no US made tanks.
Nevertheless, on 26th September 1918, the AEF attacked the German positions between the Meuse and Reims and continued on into the Argonne. By November 1918, 53,402 American soldiers had been killed in action or died of wounds. Its participation in the war had also cost American a great deal of money - $32bn or 52% of GNP at the time. The US Army returned to its paltry pre-war strength and marked time for the next 15 years.
Unlike the Royal Flying Corps, the US Army Air Corps (AAC) remained within the US Army although it attained a quasi-independent status when Congress allocated it funds for 1,800 aircraft and 16,650 personnel. The dual-purpose civilian technology driving the advancement of long-range multi-engine commercial aircraft enabled the ACC to develop their bombardment wing. The Boeing Stratoliner and the B-17 Flying Fortress bomber were variants of the same design.
Tank development struggled for the US tactical doctrine of armoured fighting vehicles (AFV) maintained that their purpose was to support infantry and hence there was no independent tank corps. Research and development was not helped by the infantry and cavalry both sponsoring different designs. By 1939, the US AFV inventory contained just the M1 Light tank, tellingly with no main armament.
Clearly there was a mountain to climb before the Army was fit for purpose. Little wonder that after the German blitzkrieg of May 1940, President Roosevelt asked Congress for $5bn for an army of 1.2 million. Fortunately, America was able to call on two outstanding men to transform its army – General George C Marshall as Chief of Staff and Henry Stimson as Secretary of War. Between them, they took charge of raising and training 13 million soldiers and airmen, supervised the spending of a third of the nation's GDP and formulated a war-winning military strategy.
The final chapter ‘Armies Today’ collects the threads from the study of these five armies and weaves them into a call for NATO and European governments to pay attention to history. The army is not the only tool in the political box but it is the one and only guardian of last resort in defence of nation states.
The knotty problem is that out of these five enthralling scholarly studies, three were authoritarian autocracies, two were bent on aggressive expansion rather than defence and none were democratic welfare states which succour their citizens with free services along with a catalogue of generous benefits and subsidies.
Will the prevailing narrative of imminent Russian westward expansion persuade European electorates to accept a painful trade-off between welfare and security? We will have to wait and see.
Alan Ogden
Published by Osprey |
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