15 Reasons Why Wars Are Utterly Stupid & Daft:

15 Reasons Why Wars Are Utterly Stupid & Daft:

A list which came about because I am in the middle of revising for my final exam on the history of warfare, a topic I loathe, and the only interesting facts I manage to find about the battles are ones that are far to trivial to write about in an essay

and

because I like lists a lot. 

1) Shoes are important:

The Battle of Gettysburg, in 1863, remains the largest battle ever to have been fought on American soil. Ever. And do you know why it came about? Confederate General Robert E. Lee's army had no shoes, and when they found themselves outside the small Pennsylvanian town of Gettysburg, they thought to themselves, 'Oh hey guys, these Northerners have lots of shoes! Let's go raid the town for them!'. So they did. Where they happened to bump into the massive Union army, and realized that they'd better start fighting. The Confederates lost the battle, sadly, so I don't think they got any shoes at the end of it all. Sadface.

2) No really, they are: 

My friend Phil told me this story: during the Crimean War, the British were hopelessly disorganised, and decided to send all the left boots down to the Crimea on one ship, and all the right ones on another. And one of the ships sank. You couldn't make it up...

3) Actually, the whole of the Crimean War was a bit of a farce: 

I feel a bit bad making fun of the Charge of the Light Brigade, because so many people died, which is obviously a horrible thing, and would've been devastating for their families and everything, but the whole thing was completely preventable. British cavalry were given the order to charge up the 'Valley of Death', waving their swords about, whilst the Russians blasted them to pieces with cannons on all sides, thinking the British must be drunk.

4) To be honest, most nineteenth century wars were totally ridiculous:

Take the Franco-Austrian War of 1859, for example. It's a fairly insignificant one, in the grand scheme of things, but one thing it is famous for is the fact that the French had the bright idea to utilize the new railways to get their troops to the battlefield fresh and ready to fight, whereas the Austrians went on a two week march to get there. Anyway, the Austrians eventually cottoned on to this train business, and sent their reserve force to the next battle this way. Except they got off at the wrong station and completely missed the battle. Really.

5) And if they weren't missing battles, they were being inadequately prepared:

So a few years later, in 1870, the French were fighting the Prussians, and they had this amazing new weapon, called the matrielleuse. It was a forerunner to the machine gun, so if you were into slaughtering innocent soldiers, it should totally have been your weapon of choice. The Prussians should have been completely wiped out, but they weren't, because the French soldiers hadn't been trained in how to use their new gun, so it was effectively completely pointless.

 

6) Still, at least the French actually had an army:

After Charles II was restored to the throne, Parliament wanted to control his actions as they were afraid he'd do what his father had done, and plunge the country into Civil War again. Their solution, therefore, was to pay for and control the Navy, whilst allowing Charles an army only if he promised to pay for it himself. (Which, y'know, doesn't seem like the brightest move ever - 'Of course you can have an army! Just as long as you're in total control of it, not us! That'll ensure you won't try to attack us or anything...') In the end, Charles didn't attack the MPs (he was too busy partying and being a closet Catholic, two things which totally go together...) but for many years, the English army wasn't officially recognised as such, and the country at least technically had no army. 

7) However rubbish and unofficial the English army was, at least it wasn't full of sheep:

So the Civil Wars themselves were very complex, and their origins even more so, but one of the reasons they occurred was because Charles I needed money from Parliament for a war he was fighting in Scotland - the Bishops' War. In this war, England and Scotland were fighting over Bibles (as you do...), but the English army was much larger than the Scottish one, so the Scottish generals found themselves in a bit of a quandary. They decided that if they could trick the English into thinking their army was much larger than it was, they might be unwilling to fight them - and this plan turned out to be a good one. They did indeed manage to trick the English, by padding out their ranks with sheep, whom the English thought were...particularly woolly soldiers? God knows how this one worked...

8) Mind you, at least they weren't being paid in wool:
During the 100 Years' War, coinage was in short supply, so the English soldiers were paid in sacks of wool. Because all a fighting bloke really wants to do is learn to knit...

9) And about that '100' Years' War business:
Yeah, it actually lasted 116 years. But looking on the bright side, standards in numeracy had improved immeasurably by the time the Seven Years' War rolled round, and that ended bang on time, in 1763.

10) Also, at least numeric names make sense:
100 Years' War, 30 Years' War, Seven Years' War - they're all fairly logical, no? War of 1812 - that's another fairly self-explanatory one. The War of Jenkins' Ear...yeah, perhaps not. Though thinking about it, it started because Captain Jenkins had his Ear cut off by Spanish coast guards, so the name isn't that daft, even if the war itself was...

11) If you thought the names of wars were daft, wait until you hear what's going on on the battlefield:
So there's a very famous miscommunication about the First World War, where some field commander or another sent a message via telegram saying, "We're going to war, send reinforcements" but this got mistranslated and ended up as "We're going to a ball, send three and fourpence", and I can kind of see how this happened but honestly, didn't anyone think to check if this was the right message, coming from, y'know, a battlefield. War does this to people...  

12) Sometimes, people switch sides in the middle of conflicts:
Have you ever watched a children's cartoon and seen one of those montages where the good guys chase the monster through a door, then you see them turning around with the monster chasing them, then next thing you know, they're chasing the monster again, and no one knows what's going on? You have? Good. Visualize that happening in real life, 'cause it did: in 1460, the Earl of Warwick invaded (I'm assuming from some far distant land, and not, y'know, the well known island of Warwickshire...) captured Henry VI and installed Edward IV on the throne. Ten years later, in 1470, Warwick invaded again (oh who knows, maybe the Midlands were suffering from a lot of flooding around that time...), this time reinstalling Henry VI. You couldn't make it up...


13) We didn't get much better in World War Two either:
So Dunkirk was this terribly disorganised thing, where a load of British soldiers were trapped on a beach in Normandy with German soldiers advancing towards them and readying their planes to fly over and drop bombs on them, so the government requisitioned every ship on the south coast, even little two or three man fisher-boats to go out and rescue them, and they managed it, securing the rescue of the soldiers trapped on the beaches. In fact, everyone was so elated by the events that Winston Churchill had to make a special radio broadcast reminding the country that this wasn't actually a victory - in fact, it was a pretty awful defeat.


14)Anyway, sometimes you don't even need to fight, you can just employ a terrible euphemism plonk your warship in someone else's harbour:
As the British did when the Portuguese threatened to renege on their promise to grant independence to Brazil. No shots were fired and no fighting happened, but a stern warning was issued, and the best ship in the Navy set sail for Lisbon just to reinforce the point.

15) And sometimes, you just need to sound convincing:
In 1823, President James Monroe issued the Monroe Doctrine to the rest of the world, which basically said "Hey you guys? Yeah, don't attack us, 'cause we'll so get you back worse". Well, I'm not sure he said it quite like that, but that was definitely the general gist of things. Anyway, Spain and Portugal, who had both been planning to continue or restart old wars, backed down completely upon hearing this. Even though, at the time, the US had no navy and a very poxy little army. So really, all you need to do is sound threatening enough!

Oh my God. Am I condoning bullying?! Oh dear...         

Aftermath

5 July, 1945. The war in Europe was over, and Britain had emerged the 'victors' of the Second World War, along with the other allied nations. For the first time in over a decade, the country prepared to go to the polls, to decide who would be the new Prime Minister. 

Leading the Conservative Party was Winston Churchill, the man who had led the country through the war and whose party had been in charge before the outbreak of the war. He was a hero - hailed as the man who had held together the uneasy alliance between Communist Russia and highly capitalist America, as well as providing a well needed morale boost for Britain with his now infamous speeches about fighting the Nazis on the beaches with blood, sweat, toil and tears, and so on.

Leading the Labour Party was a man called Clement Attlee. The uncharismatic leader was fighting the war hero at the height of his popularity. In the previous election before the war, the Labour Party had won a mere 154 seats. It was clear to everyone what was going to happen; throughout the campaign, newspapers, foreign ambassadors, members of the public - even members of the Labour Party itself - were positive that the Conservatives would win the election with the greatest of ease. Britain went to the polls on 5 July (although Churchill himself could not vote, due to having forgotten to register), then the country patiently waited three weeks for the result (they had to count the votes of hundreds of thousands of troops, many of whom were still fighting the war, some as far away as Japan, where World War Two was still ongoing).

Life carried on as normal. The News of the World printed a front page article stating that Churchill and the Conservatives had a working majority; and the leader himself flew out to take part in the Potsdam Conference (a meeting between the presidents of Russia and America, which divided up the map of Europe after the fall of the Nazi Regime, where large chunks of Eastern Europe were handed over to the Russians in return for Western Europe keeping Greece, the supposed center of western civilization). The results of the election were expected on 26 July, so on this day Mr. Churchill flew back to the UK, not even bothering to pack properly. Stalin and Eisenhower expected to see him return within a few days.

What happened, therefore, was completely unexpected. Labour won 393 seats; the Conservatives a mere 197. They had just under 50% of the vote - 49.7%, to be precise. Why? Who was Clement Attlee, and how had he - the rather unassuming, uncharismatic Deputy Prime Minister of the Second World War Coalition to Churchill's war hero - managed to win such a great victory?

Attlee was born on this day in 1883, in Putney (London), one of eight children. He studied at a private London school until the age of 18, when he won a place to the University of Oxford to study Modern History (hooray!). His first job, from 1906-09, was working as the manager of a charitable club for working class boys, which was run by his old school. Previous to this, he had been quite a conservative man, but what he saw there convinced him that only significant income redistribution by the state would suffice to lift these children out of poverty, and he therefore became a socialist, joining the Independent Labour Party.

He became involved in local politics, and supported a lot of the more left wing proposals by the Liberal government which came just before World War One - he famously rode a bicycle around the southern counties of England in the summer of 1911, explaining their new National Insurance Act. During World War One, he served in the military (he was heavily involved in the Gallipoli Campaign, which gave him much respect for Churchill as a military strategist), but quickly returned to politics after the conflict was over, becoming mayor for one of London's poorest boroughs. 

As mayor, he implemented many socialist policies, such as forcing the slum landlords to spend much more money on ensuring that their properties were habitable, and also wrote a book, The Social Worker, where he famously wrote that "Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim". In 1922 he was elected as an MP, and he became leader of the Labour Party in 1935, always remaining very much on the left of the party. 

This inherent leftiness was very appealing to the country in July 1945, though it was his endorsement of a report that had been written a few years previously by a rather old Civil Servant which probably really won the election for him. Sir William Beveridge was commissioned in 1941 to write a report on 'Social Insurance and Allied Service', a task so monumentally boring that he put it off for a whole year, then sat down and wrote something completely different to what the original memo had suggested. 

Beveridge proposed that, after the war, the British government set about making a national insurance scheme, old-age pensions, family allowances and a national health service available to everyone in the UK, stating that the nation needed to be freed of the five evils of 'Want, Ignorance, Disease, Squalor and Idleness'. The health service, he declared, would be free to all at the point of delivery and available to a person "from the cradle to the grave".

Upon reading the report, Churchill and the other leading Conservatives agreed that the report was a rather nice idea in theory, but in practice would be so monumentally expensive to actually implement that they immediately dismissed it. However, someone in the Ministry of Information didn't get the 'yeah, we're ignoring this one' memo, and thought that it would make a rather nice morale boost for the country.

It did. After being published, it quickly became an immediate bestseller, translated into seven different languages (though I can't actually find a list of what these languages were - I can hardly imagine a typical working class man wanting to read the report in, say, Latin, or worse - German.) and a special pocket edition was produced for troops and resistance fighters. And in the run up to the election, in the summer of 1945, the Labour Party basically adopted it as their manifesto. 

They also promised a return to full employment for all the troops who had fought in the war. This was of particular concern to them, as when their fathers had returned from fighting in World War One, there had been very few jobs available, and unemployment amongst ex-soldiers was rife.  The depression of the thirties was seen as the Conservatives' fault, so Labour, led by Attlee promised that they would help the British to 'win the peace, as well as the war', something which was popularly believed not to have happened after the First World War. 

Of course, it wasn't Attlee who was directly responsible for bringing in the new National Health Service - that monumental task fell to Aneurin Bevan in 1948 - but his principle of Britain as a Welfare State remains to this day, though it is weaker during times of Conservative rule. Attlee also continued his progressiveness after his government had fallen from power - in 1955 he was elevated to the House of Lords, and three years later he established the Homosexual Law Reform Society with Bertrand Russell, a group which aimed to decriminalize being gay, and after nine years of campaigning, succeeded. Sadly, Attlee did not live long enough to see this victory, dying in October 1967, but his post-war reforms live on today, a legacy which earned him the title of Greatest 20th Century Prime Minister by a poll in 2004.  

A Brief History of Latvia

 Christmas in Riga

Let's go to Latvia. Because it has a fascinating History and some of the world's loveliest looking Christmas markets and because why not. History in British schools is focused far too much on England (and, under the new government's plans, will be even more so, which is just what we need, especially as children will be growing up thinking the Empire was A Good Thing. Don't get me wrong, there weren't some benefits from it. For example...um...we ensured introduced our language to the whole world, thus ensuring that school children no longer have to worry about being able to talk about their Aunt's pen when they go to France, as who even speaks French anyway? As for all those other languages...well isn't it enough that we just know their names? We don't have to bother talking in them - everyone can address us in English, and we can just shout louder until they understand us. We're so damn cultured.) so I have very little idea about what went on in Latvia, or indeed most other Eastern European countries. After a bit of reading, though, I feel I'm ready to take you on a whistle-stop tour of the country, though I apologize in advance if I have anything wrong.

We'll base ourselves in Riga, which is the capital city of Latvia. There had been a few ancient settlements on the site of what is now Riga, but the city really took off in the twelfth century, when some German mercenaries established it as an outpost for trading with the Baltic people. Everything was going swimmingly, until Albert, Bishop of Livonia arrived in the city in 1201 armed with 23 ships and 1,500 crusaders. Despite being a Bishop, Albert clearly didn't know his Bible too well as he proceeded to forcibly take the city as his. He established the Order of Livonian Brothers of the Sword (because he wasn't very good at catchy names) and converted the people of Riga to Christianity (one hopes he wasn't leading by example).

For the next few centuries, everything went as swimmingly as it could in medieval Europe. There were, of course, outbreaks of plague and other such things, but the country wasn't really much different to Britain, or Spain, or any other country really. Riga - indeed, Latvia as a whole - was part of the Holy Roman Empire, which, despite the somewhat misleading name, meant it was actually a part of the German Empire, so the largest ethnic group in the city were German, rather than Latvian. The city was mainly used as a gateway to trade with the Russians and other Baltic peoples so the city was remarkably cosmopolitan, with influences from Prussia, Russia, Poland, Lithuania and of course Latvia itself.
 

The country converted to Protestantism with the rest of the Lutheran countries in the mid-sixteenth century, which meant that when the Thirty Years' War occurred (this is one of the hardest wars to summarize in one sentence, but here goes: a series of incredibly destructive  conflicts involving most of mainland Europe, with the two great powers of the time, the French monarchy and the Hapsburg monarchy - the rulers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - ostensibly about religion - the whole Catholicism vs. Protestantism thing - but which ended up being about power and money and who controlled what) the King of Sweden gained control of the city (supposedly to help support the largely Protestant population but mostly because of the trading, and therefore economic, benefits). 

The city remained under Swedish rule until 1710, when Peter the Great invaded and bought the city under Russian control. Despite the implementation of Russian as the country's official language, the demographic make-up of Riga was slowly changing and by the mid nineteenth century, Latvians were the majority ethnic group in the city. This coincided with the rise of the middle class in the country, who were very patriotic. In 1873, the first Latvian Song Festival was organised (a celebration of folk songs and traditional dancing) which still takes place in the city, every five years - the next concert being in 2013. 

All this was soon to change however, with the twentieth century being one of the most turbulent centuries in Latvia's History. The Russian Revolution of 1917 meant that it was quite easy for the German Army to march into the country and take over in 1918, but under the terms of the armistice, they were forced to grant Latvia freedom. It was the first time the country had been independent in its whole history. Riga, the capital city, prospered, as did the whole country. A democratic Parliament was implemented. Latvian was reinstated as the country's national language. The people flourished.

Then World War Two happened.

Stalin made a deal with Hitler in which Hitler allowed the Soviet Union to annex the country in 1940, but then the promise was reneged on in 1941 and the Germans ruled there until October 13th, 1944 when the Red Army came marching back in to take over once more. The war had decimated the country. Latvia had lost one third of its population, and its independence. The Jewish population had all but vanished under the Nazi regime; so called "Nazi collaborators" (mostly those of Latvian origin) were deported to Siberia and many thousands of Russians and other Soviet peoples were emigrated to Latvia to help suppress the native population. By 1975, less than 40% of Riga's inhabitants were ethnically Latvian.

Fortunately the Soviet Union was beginning to crumble by the late '80s, and on 21st August, 1991, the country was declared independent once again. Today it is as democratic and diverse as any other European country; a member of the European Union and a country which celebrates all of its diverse heritage. In 2001, the city of Latvia celebrated it's 800th birthday and it continues to thrive as a country to this day.

This post would not have been possible without my dear friend Charlotte and her extensive knowledge of and love for Latvian born opera singers.

Ellen Wilkinson and the Jarrow March

Seventy four years ago today, on October 5th, 1936, 200 able-bodied men from the north-eastern town of Jarrow set off for London. Over the next few days, they marched 300 miles, accompanied by a second-hand bus which carried their cooking utensils and bedding. Whilst marching, they sang songs and played mouth organs to keep up morale, and carried an oak box with gold lettering, containing a petition, signed by 11,000 citizens of the town. Signatures were  also collected on a second petition from the numerous sympathetic people they passed on their way down to London. The march was hard, but medical care was provided by the Inter Hospital Socialist Society's students. 

Why were they marching? What did their protest hope to achieve?

About a year previously, the main employer in the town - Palmer's shipyard - had been closed down. In Jarrow, as with many towns in the north-east, employment rates were at 70%. The men of Jarrow were dependent on their wives' or daughters' wages (themselves hardly substantial), which was not something that was culturally acceptable at that time. The town itself was in dire shape. In the words of the local MP, Ellen Wilkinson, it was 

"... utterly stagnant. There was no work. No one had a job except a few railwaymen, officials, the workers in the co-operative stores, and a few workmen who went out of the town... the plain fact [is] that if people have to live and bear and bring up their children in bad houses on too little food, their resistance to disease is lowered and they die before they should." [source]

Wilkinson herself is a very interesting figure. Born in 1891, she won a scholarship to the University of Manchester, never married, was briefly a member of the Communist Party, often visited Spain (during the Civil War there) and Germany to protest against Fascist groups - especially the rise of Hitler - and as Minister for Education during the post-war Labour government, managed to get the school leaving age raised to 15, despite the huge demand for extra buildings and teachers this would require. All in all, she was an amazing woman, achieving more in her lifetime than most people could in several. I would very much like to be her.

 

Ellen Wilkinson MP, 1891-1947

She also went on the march with the men of Jarrow, and presented their petition to parliament for them. As the shipyard had been closed, due to the worldwide economic downturn (sound familiar?), the men demanded that a steelworks be built to bring employment back to their town. The government, despite being largely Conservative, were not unsympathetic to their plight - nor indeed the similar plight of other men in the working towns who had been laid off due to the Depression, but there was very little they could do. There was a general lack of response to the Jarrow situation (though a ship-breaking yard was established in 1938), although their policies of  increasing domestic consumption and implementing a cheap mortgage scheme which lead to a house building boom did help boost the economy slightly.

Ultimately, though, it took World War Two, and the need for armaments and the like to give industry the boost it needed, and therefore lift the economy out of depression. I do not pretend to understand economics at all, and will defer to almost anyone's knowledge on how to avoid recessions and depressions, but surely, surely there must be a way of finding enough jobs so that everyone is employed and can afford to put food on the table, without having said jobs involve making weapons to kill others? I hope that that is not just wishful socialist thinking...

The Best Laid Plans (see also: the Munich Agreement)

I didn't intend to start writing today, but it is raining and I have a cup of tea, and I really should be doing something more important, so I suppose it's inevitable that I'm sat here planning to write about...Hitler. I know, I know. I know. I wasn't going to touch that whole topic, ever. But never say never; the best laid plans will always go wrong and other assorted cliches. I promise I'll write about Ancient Greece or something, next time.

Anyway, yes. Czechoslovakia. On 1st October, 1938, German troops marched into the Sudetenland,  Czechoslovakia, under the auspices of the Munich Agreement. What does this even mean? Well, in very, very simple terms, the Munich Agreement was a little bit of paper that the British Prime Minister at the time, Neville Chamberlain, came back from Germany with, on which was a promise from Hitler that he would not attempt to attack Britain or France in return for them accepting that the Sudetenland (an area of Czechoslovakia) should be ceded to Germany, and, on 1st October, he duly marched in.

(What are you talking about, wanting to know what the people of the Sudetenland felt about all this?! Pfft. As if that matters.)

Anyway, that was all fine and dandy, Mr. Chamberlain truly believed that he had secured "peace in our time", and everything was just peachy. Except of course it wasn't because Hitler is a Terrible Person and immediately (well, in March '39) set about annexing the rest of Czechoslovakia and other European countries, which eventually lead to war in September '39, as of course everyone knows.

The problem is, whilst that's the version everyone knows, it isn't necessarily the right version. The Bad Man Hitler did some Bad Things, and everyone hates him. Of course, he did do some terrible, awful things, and my point is not to try to defend the indefensible, such as the Holocaust, but to argue that there are (almost always) two sides to every story. A lot of people truly believe that it was only Hitler who started the Second World War, and that is just not true. Yes, he played a part in it. But as the Historian AJP Taylor argues, in his brilliant book, Hitler did not set out to cause the war, but blundered into it as a result of the shortcomings of others.

Again, this is not an attempt to switch the blame and point to Chamberlain and the other allied leaders as being the 'Evil' ones - quite the opposite. Hitler and Chamberlain both thought that they were doing the right thing for their country, in creating the Munich Agreement. Chamberlain, like many of his generation, absolutely did not want a repeat of the horrors of World War One, and did all he could to appease Hitler and prevent another war. Hitler also had the specter of the First World War looming large around him, as he believed that Germany had been treated unfairly at the end of the war, and, faced with reparations that they could not even begin to pay, he felt forced to take matters into his own hands.

The problem with History is illustrated very neatly here - it's such a subjective subject that no one can ever say "this person was evil" or "this event was a good thing for everyone" because such simplistic judgments ignore key arguments and don't take into account all of the facts available. Hitler did do some unspeakably awful things, but at this point in time, he was merely trying to help his people as best he could - as were the other leaders of other countries. 

So, never accept anybody - Historian or otherwise - who tries to tell you that what their view is the 'right' view, and that all other arguments are worthless.

Unless that person is me :)