It was one of ten similar fleets across the empire. It was employed like an army service corps because it reported to the procurator in Britain rather than the governor. The procurator was in charge of tax collection, and so the fleet was there to make the province of Britain pay into the imperial treasury.
This article is an edited transcript of Roman Navy in Britain: The Classis Britannica with Simon Elliott.
Epigraphic evidence of the Classis Britannica
The fleet had its origins in the Claudian invasion of Britain in AD 43 when 900 ships were constructed to carry Aulus Plautius’ huge invasion force of 40,000 legionaries and auxilia from northwestern Gaul. There’s a strong epigraphic record of the fleet; that is, references to the fleet within writing on funerary monuments. A lot of the relevant epigraphy is in Boulogne, which is where the Classis Britannica was headquartered.
Boulogne served as the headquarters of the fleet because, not only did the fleet have responsibility for the English Channel, the Atlantic approaches, the east and west coasts of England and the Irish Sea, but it also had responsibility for the northwestern continental coast of the Roman Empire, all the way up to the Rhine.
That reflects how the Romans viewed the English Channel and the North Sea in a different way to how we might see it today. For them, it wasn’t the barrier that we see in recent military history; it was actually a point of connectivity, and a motorway by which Roman Britain remained a fully functioning part of the Roman Empire.
The navy in archaeology
We know where a lot of the fleet’s fortified harbours were, thanks to the archaeological record, which provides a lot of detail. This record also includes a piece of graffiti on some waste lead from Roman Britain that depicts a Roman galley. It was clearly drawn by somebody who had actually seen a Roman galley for themselves and so, in that, we have an absolutely wonderful piece of first-hand evidence depicting a galley on a ship in the Classis Britannica.
The Classis Britannica also ran some of the province’s metal industries. This included the iron industry in the Weald, which the fleet ran through to the middle of the 3rd century and which made a lot of the iron that the military on the province’s northern borders needed to operate. The archaeological record provides a lot of detail for the Classis Britannica.
The fleet’s big iron working sites were monumental in scale, about factory size to us today. We know they were run by the fleet because all of the buildings have tiles stamped with the Classis Britannica insignia.
Written evidence about Britain’s Roman navy
There is also important evidence in the written record. The first time that the naval force was mentioned was in the Flavian period, in the context of a failure in the year 69. The Classis Britannica was recorded by the historian Tacitus as taking a British legion across to the Rhine to help fight Civilis and his revolting Batavians.
The Rembrandt painting The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis depicts a Batavian oath to Gaius Julius Civilis.
The legionary commander, Fabius Priscus, then marched his legion against the Nervii and Tungri tribes who had proved so troublesome almost 130 years earlier to Julius Caesar during his Gallic campaigns. However, the legate appears to have left his fleet in a vulnerable situation with no guards.
This invasion force worth of ships, which had effectively carried an entire legion, was then left in the Rhine estuary overnight, unprotected. The local Germans burnt it to a cinder. As a result, the first reference to the Classis Britannica in the written record was made in ignominy. The fleet was rebuilt very quickly, however.
The navy in the 1st and 2nd centuries
By the mid-70s AD, the province of Britannia was effectively established along lines that remained recognisable for the rest of the Roman occupation, the northern border on the Solway Firth – Tyne line later to be fortified by Hadrian. The Classis Britannica played a major role in the ambitious attempts of the governor Gnaeus Julius Agricola to conquer Scotland.
The Classis Britannica spent much of the 2nd century AD supporting the military presence on the northern border, coming back into focus again in 196 AD when the British Governor Clodius Albinus launched an unsuccessful usurpation attempt against the Emperor Septimius Severus.
However, the fleet was back in action again by the early 3rd century AD when Severus attempted his own ‘shock and awe’ conquest of Scotland. By this time the Maeatae around the line of the now abandoned Antonine Wall, and Caledonians further north, had become so troublesome that the governor sent a desperate dispatch requesting new troops or the Emperor himself. He got both.
Britain’s Roman navy and Septimus Severus
Severus crossed the English Channel in AD 208 with a huge Imperial entourage including with the Praetorian Guard, Imperial guard cavalry and crack units from the continental legions. This was again transported by the Classis Britannica which landed the troops in all of the ports down the east coast given the army’s size.
The last time the fleet was ever mentioned was in 249 in the context of the funerary stelae of Saturninus, a captain of the Classis Britannica. This captain was from North Africa, which shows how cosmopolitan the Roman Empire was.
There are also records of people from Syria and Iraq up around Hadrian’s Wall. In fact, there is epigraphy along the Wall which reveals that the Classis Britannica actually built parts of the structure and also helped to maintain it. Meanwhile, there is a reference towards the end of the Roman Empire in Britain of some Tigris boatman acting as bargemen on the Tyne.
What happened to the Classis Britannica?
As detailed earlier, we know the fleet disappears from the historical record in the middle of the 3rd century AD, but the cause is a mystery.
A number of events in the 3rd century are candidates. One is the scramble for Imperial control between the Senate and the military after the assassination of Alexander Severus in AD 235, the event which initiated the ‘Crisis of the 3rd Century’.
Another was the usurping Gallic Empire founded by Postumus that lasted from AD 260 to AD 274. Finally, there is the tale of another usurper, Carausius and his North Sea Empire that lasted from AD 286 to AD 296.
Any could have presented a situation where the Classis Britannica found itself on the wrong side of usurpation, the fleet suffering dramatically as a result.
]]>Today, it can take three flights to reach Lofoten from London and, once on the Norwegian archipelago, it can feel as though you are on the edge of the world. But in the Viking era, it was quite the opposite: the islands were actually knitted into trade, social, business and political networks that spread right across northern and western Europe.
In fact, Lofoten was home to the biggest Viking house that has ever been found. Uncovered by archaeologists on the island of Vestvågøy in 1983, this longhouse is thought to have belonged to successive Lofoten chieftains. A reconstruction has since been built 40 metres from the excavation site, and forms part of the Lofotr Viking Museum.
This article is an edited transcript of Vikings of Lofoten on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 16 April 2016.
The biggest Viking house ever found
The reconstructed longhouse that forms part of the Lofotr Viking Museum. Credit: Jörg Hempel / Commons
The excavated remains and the reconstruction reveal the house to be enormous – it measured 83 metres long, nine metres wide and about nine metres high. The building’s size is unsurprising given that it served as the home of the archipelago’s rich and powerful chieftains, with the last occupant believed to be Olaf of Lofoten.
The chieftain would have lived in the house with his family, as well as his most trusted men and women – around 40 to 50 people altogether. But it wasn’t just people who lived there. Half of the house served as a large barn that was home to horses and cows. A gold-plated horse harness was excavated from the site of the original barn – an indicator of the chieftains’ status and wealth.
The original house on the site was built in around 500 AD but later made bigger and longer, and rebuilt and restructured a couple of times. The house on which the reconstruction is based was built in around the year 900 – around 100 years after the start of the Viking era.
At that point, Vikings from Scandanavia were attacking as far as England and Ireland, and on the verge of settling Iceland and even places across the Atlantic Ocean.
Olaf of Lofoten – and Iceland?
The last Viking chieftain to have lived in the house – Olaf – is thought to have left for Iceland, and there is a possible reference to him in one of the Icelandic sagas:
“There came a man from Lofotr, Olaf was his name.”
“Lofotr” was the former name of Vestvågøy but later given to the whole of the island group. In English, however, the archipelago is referred to as “Lofoten”.
To have travelled to Iceland at that time and to have conquered new land, a Viking would have needed to have been rich and powerful. They would have needed a ship, horses and enough money to fund resettling there. As the Lofoten chieftain, Olaf likely would have had all of that. So the chances are very good that he did indeed go to Iceland.
Inside the reconstructed chieftain’s house
The reconstruction enables visitors to get a feel for a Viking chieftain’s house, albeit minus the livestock. Vast and echo-y, it’s a dramatic space and has a sort of grandeur to it. Plastic and metal are nowhere to be seen, with both the building itself and the furniture made of wood.
The walls, meanwhile, are covered with sheep and reindeer skins, giving the building a cosy feel despite its vastness. It’s easy to imagine spending a Viking winter there, coming in from the terrible weather outside when there would have been a fire going, the smell of smoke and tar mixing with the smell of food cooking in the air, and the sounds of craftspeople working all around.
A resourceful people
Whether they were building ships or remarkable buildings like the chieftain’s house on Lofoten, the Vikings proved themselves to be extraordinary craftspeople who were phenomenally good at working with wood, textiles and metal. And they had to be in order to survive some pretty tricky weather.
They also had to make use of the resources that were to hand or relatively easily accessible. Wood wasn’t plentiful on the Lofoten Islands, but the Vikings didn’t have to travel too far by boat in order to import the big trees needed for the kind of work seen at the Lofoten chieftain’s house, which includes huge pillars decorated with beautiful hand-carvings.
When it came to metal work, the Vikings made – among other things – jewellery and sword grips that were rich with ornaments and so detailed that, even if they had been produced today, you might find it hard to believe they were handmade.
Meanwhile, unlike today where we see water as representing a barrier, the Vikings on Lofoten were at the centre of a trading network. As seafarers, they could travel extensively and reach London or central Europe in just a few days; in some respects they were actually at the centre of the world.
Of course, back then, Lofoten was still at the top of the world. But it was a very rich part of the world when it came to resources. So it’s easy to understand why people decided to live there. There was plenty of fish in the sea, as well as other marine life to live off. There would have been game in the forests and lots of other natural resources available that would have been greatly sought after in other parts of the world.
]]>The idea of that, even before the Gallipoli landings happened, provoked what was then called the “Eastern Question”: what would happen after the Ottomans had been defeated? To both pursue and answer that question, the British government set up a committee. Mark Sykes was the youngest member of the committee and he spent the most time of all its members on the subject, thinking through the options.
This article is an edited transcript of The Sykes-Picot Agreement with James Barr, available on History Hit TV.
Who was Mark Sykes?
Sykes had been a Conservative MP for four years by 1915. He was the son of Sir Tatton Sykes, a very eccentric Yorkshire baronet who had three joys in life: milk pudding, church architecture and the maintenance of his body at a constant temperature.
Sir Tatton Sykes had taken Mark to Egypt for the first time when he was about 11 years old. Mark was blown away by what he saw, like many tourists have been since, and he went back there repeatedly as a young man and as a student.
After he got a job as an attaché in the British Embassy in Constantinople, the younger Sykes returned to Egypt repeatedly. This all culminated in 1915 with the publication of his book The Caliphs’ Last Heritage, which was a part-travel diary and a part-history of the decay of the Ottoman Empire. The book established him as an expert on that part of the world.
Mark Sykes
Image Credit: Public Domain
But was he actually an expert?
Not really. Mark Sykes was rather what we’d think of as an adventurous tourist. You would get the impression (as people did within the British cabinet) that he could speak a number of Eastern languages, including Arabic and Turkish. But, in fact, he could speak none of them beyond sort of saying marhaba (hello) or shukran (thank you), and things like that.
But the book, which is about two inches thick, gave him this air of learning, not to mention he’d actually been to that part of the world. That in itself was a relatively rare thing. Most British politicians had not been there. They would have even struggled to place many of the most important towns and cities on a map of the area. So in contrast to the people he was dealing with, Sykes knew a lot more about it than they did – but he didn’t know that much.
The strange thing was that the people who did know about it had by and large been posted out to Cairo or to Basra or were based in Deli. Sykes enjoyed influence because he was still back at the seat of power and knew something about the subject. But there were many people who knew more about the issues than he did.
Splitting the sick man of Europe in two
The committee that was set up to determine Britain’s strategic interest in the Middle East finalised its views in the middle of 1915 and Sykes was sent out to Cairo and to Deli to canvas British officials about what they thought about the ideas.
The committee originally thought about dividing the Ottoman Empire up along its existing provincial lines and creating a kind of Balkan system of mini-states in which Britain could then pull the strings.
Detail of map of Sykes-Picot Agreement, showing areas of control agreed between the British and French in West Asia.
Image Credit: Public Domain
But Sykes had a much clearer idea. He proposed to divide the empire in two, “down the line that ran from the E in Acre to the Last K in Kirkuk” – with this line in practice being a British-controlled defensive cordon across the Middle East that would protect the land routes to India. And, surprisingly enough, the officials in Egypt and India all agreed with his idea rather than the idea of the majority of the committee.
So he went back to London saying, “Well, actually, no one likes your idea, but they like my idea of this belt of English-controlled country” – that was the phrase he used – that would go from the Mediterranean coast to the Persian frontier, and act as a way of keeping Britain’s jealous European rivals away from India.
Did oil play a big part in this British decision?
The British knew about oil in Persia, now Iran, but they didn’t at that point appreciate how much oil there was in Iraq. So the bizarre thing about the Sykes-Picot agreement is that it’s not about oil. It’s actually about the fact that the Middle East is a strategic crossroads between Europe, Asia and Africa.
]]>In reality, however, nearly a year prior to D-Day, British Commonwealth and American Allied forces landed on the toe of Italy in 1943 and then, a few days later, at Salerno, in what were the main landings to really push towards Rome.
This article is an edited transcript of Italy and World War 2 with Paul Reed, available on History Hit .
Why did the Allies invade Italy?
The Italian campaign came about after the campaign in North Africa ended in May 1943 with the surrender of the Afrika Korps.
The Allies had discussed at Yalta the need to open a second front in the war to relieve pressure on the eastern front. However, the Allies were not then in a position to make a proper landing in France.
Salerno D-Day plan
Image Credit: Public Domain
The American belief was that the only way to defeat the Nazi regime was to land in France, go to Paris, to capture Paris, to push on to Belgium, to capture Belgium, and then to capture Holland – at which point the Allies would have a route into Nazi Germany.
But that wasn’t possible in the summer of 1943. So the compromise was to try and come in through the back door, an idea that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill believed in. Churchill called Italy the “soft underbelly of the Third Reich”. That’s what Italy was to him and indeed to others as well.
The route through Sicily
There was a plan to attack through Italy on a second front, push up through Italy and into Austria, entering Germany that way. And it sounded easy. But by the end of the campaign, veterans called it the “tough old gut of Europe”.
Although the Allies had decided upon an invasion of Italy from North Africa, it wasn’t possible to do that directly. There wasn’t enough shipping or enough aircraft to cover an assault. Instead, it was going to be a two-step operation.
The Allies would go across the Mediterranean, capture the island of Sicily, and use that as a staging post to go to the Italian mainland.
When did the British and Commonwealth troops invade Sicily?
Troops from Sicily arrive under shell fire during the landing at Salerno, September 1943.
The landings at Sicily took place in July 1943, with British and Commonwealth troops arriving on one side of the island and the Americans landing on the other side. There was some tough fighting on the island of Sicily in the countryside.
The beginnings of a rivalry between Britain’s Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and US Lieutenant General George S. Patton emerged and some have suggested that they over-focused on that rivalry, consequently allowing German forces to get away across the Strait of Messina.
While the Allies did capture Sicily, it wasn’t the complete success they had hoped for, and the fight for the rest of Italy was yet to come.
]]>This article is an edited transcript of My Mum & Dad – Peter Snow & Ann MacMillan on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 6 October 2017. You can listen to the full episode below or to the full podcast for free on Acast.
The ordinary people who get caught up in war and their experiences, tragedies, successes and happiness are a huge part of the story of dramatic conflicts. Here are eight individuals whose extraordinary wartime stories have often been overlooked but which are nonetheless incredibly compelling and important.
1. Edward Seager
Edward Seager fought in the Crimea as a hussar. He charged in the Charge of the Light Brigade and survived but was badly wounded.
It was a terrible, terrible story, but nothing was ever heard of Seager for a long time afterwards. His story eventually came to light, however, when his great, great-nephew (a friend of Peter Snow and Ann MacMillan) produced the hussar’s diary – which had been in his loft.
2. Krystyna Skarbek
Krystyna Skarbek was Polish and when Germany invaded Poland in 1939, sparking World War Two, she hightailed it to London and volunteered to join the SOE, the Special Operations Executive.
Said to be Winston Churchill’s favourite spy, Skarbek was extremely effective, going into Poland undercover, helping organise the Polish resistance and sending back reports on German troop movements.
She was even actually handed by one of her Polish couriers the very first photographic evidence that the Germans were moving troops up to the Russian border.
Those pictures ended up on Churchill’s desk, along with a few other bits of information, and he actually warned Stalin that the Germans were about to turn on them. And Stalin said, “Nope. I don’t believe you. I think this is an Allied plot to end my pact with Germany”. How wrong he was.
The other interesting thing about Christine Granville, as Skarbek was also known during her spying career, is that she was extremely attractive to men and that she loved men. So she had several affairs while she was a spy.
After the war, however, she sadly found it very difficult to fit back into civilian life. She eventually got a job on a cruise ship where she had an affair with a fellow worker. But when she called it off, he stabbed her to death in the dingy corridor of a London hotel.
3. Helen Thomas
Helen Thomas’ husband, Edward Thomas, was a poet. And he went off to fight in the Battle of Arras in France in World War Two, and was killed there in 1917. Helen wrote an account of her last days with her husband and it’s incredibly moving stuff.
4. Franz von Werra
Franz von Werra was one of the very few Nazi pilots in the Luftwaffe who actually escaped from British prisoner of war camps. He succeeded in escaping twice inside Britain and then he was shipped off to Canada.
During one of his escapes, Werra tried to whip a Hurricane Fighter to go back to Germany and jolly nearly got it until the station officer realised he’d been conned by this chap who had claimed to be a Dutch pilot fighting with the Royal Air Force. And so Werra was nobbled.
He was then sent off to Canada, which the British thought was a clever thing to do with Germans because Canada was such a long way away. But it also happened to be rather close to a country which in 1941 was still neutral: the United States.
So Werra decided, “Hang on, if I can get across the Saint Lawrence River into the USA, I’ll be safe”. And he got across.
It was January. The river was frozen stiff and Werra walked across it and was eventually flown back to Germany. Hitler was thrilled and gave him the Iron Cross.
5. Nicholas Winton
Winton saved the lives of nearly 1,000 children before World War Two but was incredibly modest about the fact. Credit: cs:User:Li-sung / Commons
Nicholas Winton organised Kindertransport, a rescue effort that involved trains taking children from Czechoslovakia to London just before World War Two broke out in 1939.
Three Jewish people who were children on his trains – all of whose parents died in concentration camps – have said it took them a very long time to find out who had actually saved their lives because Winton was terribly modest and didn’t really tell anybody what he had done.
It was only 50 years after the fact that diaries and scrapbooks came to light that revealed his story and he became a national hero. Winton’s wife had found these scrapbooks in their attic and asked him what they were, and he said, “Oh, yeah, I saved a few kids”.
Turned out he had saved nearly 1,000 children from Czechoslovakia before the war.
6. Laura Secord
Laura Secord is famous in Canada for walking 20 miles during the War of 1812 to warn the British – who were being helped by Canadian militia – that the Americans were going to attack. She went into obscurity after that happened and it was only 50 years later that her story became known.
When the British Prince Regent Edward, Queen Victoria’s oldest son, visited Canada for a tour of Niagara Falls, he was handed a bunch of testimonials from people, memories of what had happened in the War of 1812, and one of them was by Secord.
Laura Secord became a national heroine in Canada at the age of 80.
He took it home to London, read it and said, “Oh, this is interesting”, and sent her £100.
So dear old 80-year-old Mrs Secord, who was living in obscurity, suddenly received £100 from the Prince of Wales and became famous.
The newspapers got the story and she became a national heroine.
7. Augusta Chiwy
Augusta Chiwy was a black Congolese woman who was living in Belgium during World War Two and who became a nurse.
When the Germans had been pushed out of Belgium in 1944, Chiwy decided to visit her parents one day in a nice little place called Bastogne. During her visit, Hitler decided to do a huge counter-attack, what was called the Battle of the Bulge, and the Germans came bursting back into Belgium, surrounded Bastogne, and started killing Americans in their hundreds and thousands.
And Chiwy, who was essentially on holiday, wonderfully rose to the occasion and nursed these American soldiers.
One American doctor was there too and he worked very closely with Chiwy. They were almost the only two medical people in Bastogne at the time.
Some of the wounded Americans, particularly from the south of America, the southern states, said, “I’m not going to be treated by a black”. And this doctor said, “Well, in that case, you can die”.
Chiwy died in August 2015, aged 94.
8. Ahmad Terkawi
Ahmad Terkarwi owned a pharmacy in Homs in Syria. It was bombed out and he’s not even sure who bombed it – whether it was the Syrian government or the rebels – but it disappeared. And then he helped treat some people who were wounded in Homs and got onto a government blacklist because some of the people he treated were rebels. He also treated government supporters but he was still put on a blacklist.
So, he had to escape from the country, which he did, and then he and his wife and two small children made the terrible journey from Jordan to Greece, via Turkey.
He paid a smuggler £7,000 to take them to a Greek island and they made the trip in the dark of night. When they got to the island, the smuggler said, “Oh, I can’t go any closer in this boat because there are rocks. You’ll have to get out and swim”.
So Terkarwi said, “I’m not getting out to swim with my one-year-old and four-year-old sons. Take me back to Turkey”. And the smuggler said, “No, I’m not taking you back and you will swim”. “No, I won’t,” said Terkawi and the smuggler repeated, “You will swim”, before picking up Terkawi’s four-year-old and throwing him in the water.
Terkarwi jumped in and luckily managed to find his son in the dark.
Then the smuggler picked up the one-year-old and threw him in the water too. And so Terkarwi’s wife leapt out of the boat.
They both managed to find the children and swim to shore, but they left all their belongings behind on the boat.
The smuggler took all their stuff back to Turkey, and the family then had to make their way across Europe, and they had some horrible things happen to them. But they eventually ended up in Sweden.
]]>This article is an edited transcript of 1066: Battle of Hastings with Marc Morris, available on History Hit TV.
Harold Godwinson met Duke William of Normandy, later William the Conqueror, on a battlefield near Hastings in September 1066. The English king had just defeated Viking invaders in the north, at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, and had rushed the length of the country to meet William on the battlefield in Sussex.
The first thing to say about the Battle of Hastings is that it was a very unusual face-off – a fact that contemporaries recognised. You can see it clearly on the Bayeux Tapestry, a contemporary source which shows that the English elite did not fight using cavalry.
Instead, they stood to fight in the tradition of their Anglo-Saxon predecessors and their traditional enemies, the Vikings. They drew themselves up in the famous shield wall and presented this static face to their enemy.
The Normans, since giving up being Vikings a century or so earlier, had completely embraced the Frankish mode of warfare, which was based on mounted cavalry.
The Norman elite hurtled up the hill on their horses trying to break the Saxon shield wall by throwing missiles, javelins and axes at it, but they didn’t have much effect.
The shield wall breaks
For hours, the shield wall held. Then, in what might have been a ploy, or an accident that became a ploy, the Norman line started to give way.
There was a panic on the Norman side and a rumour ran through the Norman line that William was dead.
On the Bayeux Tapestry there’s a famous scene where William takes off his helmet and rides along the line, showing his men that he’s still alive and encouraging them to follow him. William personally stopped the line from collapsing.
Whether that was a ruse or not is unclear. But, when the Anglo-Saxons up on the ridge saw that the Normans were running away, they believed that the battle was over and started running down the hill to pursue them. The Normans then wheeled around and picked off the scattered Anglo-Saxons at will.
The flight of the Normans, feigned or otherwise, compromised the integrity of the shield wall.
From that point on, the Anglo-Saxons started to become more vulnerable and gaps began to open up in the formerly impenetrable barrier.
An unusually long battle
It was also very unusual that the battle went on all day. It was a long attritional conflict, which was only ended by groups of Anglo-Saxon warriors breaking discipline and charging, getting surrounded and cut off, and finally being cut down. It was a very slow moving battle.
At that time, you would have expected such a battle to have been over in an hour or a couple of hours.
The unusual length might have been due to the fact that there were two different types of warfare clashing, but it also shows that the two sides were well matched.
There are any number of books guessing the numbers on both sides, but the truth is that we haven’t the foggiest idea of how many were fighting for either army. It is likely there were no more than 10,000 Normans, however.
That estimate is based on the numbers who fought in battles that occurred in later centuries, from which we have better evidence, such as payrolls and muster lists.Since no English king in the later Middle Ages ever managed to get more than 10,000 men across the Channel, it seems almost impossible that William the Conqueror – who was, after all, only the Duke of Normandy at that time – could have topped that figure.
There was possibly about 10,000 on both sides at the Battle of Hastings – simply based on the fact that the battle went on all day, which suggests the two armies were extremely well matched.
The shield wall’s strength was in its unity; when solid it could last all day. But once it was fractured, it became very vulnerable.
We’re told that the shield wall was compromised and that the Anglo-Saxons started to fall in greater and greater numbers. But that didn’t have to mean the end for Harold; although he would have likely lost the battle regardless at that point, the Anglo-Saxons could have started running away.
But Harold ends up dying – perhaps because he stayed and fought. His death naturally put an end to his chances of resisting William any further and cemented the Norman conquest of England.
]]>This article is an edited transcript of The Battle of Waterloo with Peter Snow available on History Hit TV.
When he heard the news that France’s Napoleon Bonaparte had crossed the border into what is now Belgium, Britain’s Duke of Wellington was at a big party in Brussels, the most famous ball in history. Many of the finest dandies in the British army were dancing the night away with their girlfriends or wives at the the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball when Wellington received the news.
The Battle of Quatre Bras
Wellington ordered Picton, one of his best subordinate generals, to march south as fast as he could to try and hold the crossroads at Quatre Bras. Meanwhile, he would try and confirm the movements of the Prussians and attempt to join forces so that, together, they might overwhelm Napoleon.
But by the time Wellington’s men got to Quatre Bras in enough force, Napoleon was already giving the Prussians a good beating at Ligny, and there were elements of Napoleon’s army pressing up the roads of Brussels at Quatre Bras.
The British were unable to go and help the Prussians to the extent that they might otherwise have done, however, because they were by then involved in their own battle at Quatre Bras.
Henry Nelson O’Neil’s painting, Before Waterloo, depicts the Duchess of Richmond’s famous ball on the eve of the battle.
Napoleon’s plan was working. He had occupied the Prussians and his troops, led by the formidable Marshal Michel Ney, were confronting Wellington at Quatre Bras.
But then things began to go wrong. Napoleon sent General Charles Lefèbvre-Desnoëttes to reinforce Ney with 20,000 men. Lefèbvre-Desnoëttes, however, marched backwards and forwards, never joining Ney and never re-joining Napoleon to attack the Prussians. Consequently, Ney was desperately under-resourced when he faced Wellington at Quatre Bras.
Wellington was very distrustful of many of the elements of his army. He called it an infamous army, and considered it very weak and ill-equipped. Two-thirds were foreign troops and many of them had never fought under his command before.
Consequently, Wellington approached the Waterloo campaign with caution. Not only was he uncertain about the army under his command, but it was also the first time that he’d come up against Napoleon.
Marshal Ney led the French at Quatre Bras.
Napoleon’s critical error
On the night of 16 June, it was clear that the Prussians had been driven back. Therefore, though Wellington had held his own against Ney, he knew he couldn’t stay there because Napoleon could have swung around and smashed into his army’s flank.
So Wellington withdrew, a very hard thing to do in the face of the enemy. But he did it very effectively. Ney and Napoleon made a terrible mistake letting him withdraw so easily.
Wellington marched his men 10 miles north, through terrible weather, from Quatre Bras to Waterloo. He arrived at a ridge that he’d identified the year before while surveying the landscape for useful defensive features.
The ridge, which is just south of the village of Waterloo, is known as Mont-Saint-Jean. Wellington had decided to retreat to the ridge if he couldn’t hold the enemy at Quatre Bras. The plan was to hold them at Mont-Saint-Jean until the Prussians could come and help.
Napoleon had missed a trick by allowing Wellington to withdraw to Mont-Saint-Jean. It was foolish of him not to attack Wellington as soon as he’d destroyed the Prussian army.
The day after the Battle of Ligny, which saw Napoleon defeat the Prussians, was a wet and miserable one and Napoleon didn’t take the opportunity of hitting Wellington’s troops as they pulled back to Waterloo. It was a big mistake.
Nonetheless, as Napoleon’s men pulled their guns slowly across the muddy terrain towards Waterloo, he remained confident that he could hit Wellington. He was also confident that the Prussians were now eliminated from the battle.
]]>An epic showdown between France and a coalition of European nations, the battle was Napoleon Bonaparte’s last stand and, ultimately, the moment that his epoch-defining leadership of France came to an end.
It’s also remembered as a face-off between two of history’s great military commanders, Napoleon and Britain’s Duke of Wellington.
This article is an edited transcript of The Battle of Waterloo with Peter Snow available on History Hit TV.
Two very different characters
Wellington had fought across India, Portugal, Spain and southern France as a commander, and achieved a string of stunning victories against many of Napoleon’s senior generals, but never against Napoleon Bonaparte himself. Waterloo was the first time that the two men would meet on the battlefield.
Wellington was austere, intelligent and remote, but a hugely respected commander.
He was known to his officers as the “Peer”, because he was very grand, very aristocratic, and he rode a horse called Copenhagen. And, whereas Napoleon was very lavish with praise and lavish with rewards, Wellington was very tight, very disciplined, very cold and very hard.
As an old man, he was asked, “Do you have any regrets,” and he said, “Yes, I should have given more praise”.
Wellington was austere, intelligent and remote, but a hugely respected commander.
By contrast, Napoleon was hugely charismatic and extremely popular with his troops. He had been comprehensively defeated in Moscow in Russia, 1812, at Leipzig in 1813 and, of course, he had abdicated in 1814.
But he bounced back in 1815, only 100 days before Waterloo. Indeed, such was his popularity that, upon arriving back in France, he was immediately carried on the shoulders of his army all the way back to Paris.
On returning to Paris, Napoleon was greeted by a great surge of popularity. There he was, Napoleon Bonaparte, back again, and, unbelievably, he was gathering an army to attack a formidable coalition of allies.
Napoleon was hugely charismatic and extremely popular with his troops.
The outlaw versus the duke
All of the enemies of France came together, declaring Napoleon an outlaw. The Spanish, some of the Italian kingdoms, the Austrians, the Russians, the Prussians, many of the German nations and the British all formed armies to face Napoleon.
But Wellington’s army, together with that of his Prussian allies, was Napoleon’s first target.
The setting was southern Belgium. Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher led the Prussians and Wellington commanded an allied army made up of British, Dutch and Belgian troops, and many German troops as well. Only one-third of Wellington’s army was British and Irish.
Blücher’s substantial Prussian force was spread out across southern Belgium, waiting for Napoleon to make his move. And it was pretty surprised by the speed and secrecy with which he did so. He crossed the border while the British and the Prussian armies were still coalescing.
The date of 15 June 1815 is an extraordinary moment in history.
Napoleon crossed the Belgian frontier with a 100,000-strong army, knowing that he faced an enormous Coalition army of something like a million men. It’s hard not to admire his chutzpah. Napoleon was undoubtedly a gambler.
On 16 June 1815, he attacked Blücher in the Battle of Ligny, and succeeded in significantly damaging the Prussian army. Then, having removed Blücher from the field, he turned his attention to Wellington.
]]>This article is an edited transcript of Tank Commander with Captain David Render available on History Hit TV.
I am a Normandy veteran from 1944-45. I was a lieutenant troop leader of Five Troop, a squadron in the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry for Nottinghamshire Yeomanry. I was 19 when I was in action against the Germans.
I had joined the army on my 18th birthday because it was the thing to do. It took a year and a half to train us from being a schoolboy to being a lieutenant and being able to command a troop of four tanks.
At that point we were in Sherman tanks, but we did have one Sherman Firefly later on.
Landing tanks at D-Day
I went over to France on D2. The regiment went on D-Day, but I didn’t know anything about them at that point. I was just a reinforcement. I took over 16 Cromwell tanks, and we went across to hand the tanks and the men over.
On D3 we floated about on a ship, which was rather like a snake going over the waves. We landed at about 4 o’clock on D4. The captain came over and said, “Get these tanks off.” He used a very old English word to tell me to hurry up. And I said to the first tank, “Right. Off you go.”
A Sherman M4 tank in Normany.
He went down the ramp. It went down and down and – woof! – upside down, complete with the men in it, and disappeared.
Obviously something had gone wrong. I didn’t know what it was. The captain came over, and he gave me the most enormous ticking off for doing it.
I would rather have been at home with mum at that time.
I stood there frightened to death really. At the time, we were being machine-gunned and under attack by Messerschmitt 109s. It wasn’t really a very nice place to be. I would rather have been at home with mum at that time.
The crew of the first tank drowned. There were only two people inside because it was only a skeleton crew. Normally, a tank’s got five people in it, but we were just taking it to the front. We were a reinforcement.
My first command in Europe, and the first thing that happened was that we lost a tank. Immediately.
I was concerned about it, to put it mildly, and the captain didn’t help because he was blaming me for doing it. I hadn’t done anything.
He said, “Tell the bloke to get off the ship. Tell the driver to get off the ship.” They went down the ramp and I couldn’t understand what had happened.
My first command in Europe, and the first thing that happened was that we lost a tank.
They pulled the ship back, but they put a sea anchor out with a huge hawser and they had put the thing into reverse. Fortunately, the tide was still coming in.
They just managed to get the ship off the shore. As they did it, the hawser broke with a terrific crash.
It came back and it sawed all the sort of funnels and rails on the other side of the ship clean off, as if it were a knife.
We weren’t standing on that side, but if we had been, we would have had it of course.
Dummy landing craft were used as decoys before D-Day. Bletchley Park played a key role in the deception.
Then we came in again, and the ramp went down. Off we went with the other tanks.
Fifty years later, I went back and took a photograph of the area of Gold Beach, where we landed, while the tide was out. If you look at that area, with the way the tides are there, you will find that the sea has a habit of scooping trenches out.
We were right on the edge of a hole, and the tank went by a bit of bad luck. Instead of going into 8 foot of water, he went into 18 foot of water. That was the start.
We got the other the other 15 tanks off, and we were up on the on the shore. The crew on the ship were very nervous and edgy about the whole thing.
I didn’t stop to talk. We went off. Then the tanks were taken off me very quickly because they were needed to fight.
The Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry
The next thing was I was directed to a thing called Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry. I had never heard of the Sherwood Rangers. I met this fellow, John Simpkin, who was a captain, because when the regiment was landing on D-Day the colonel was killed.
They had various casualties. They lost about 10 tanks getting onto the shore.
A squadron were landed dry – they weren’t swimming tanks – and they went on down to Bayeux. I joined them at a place called Fontenay, just south of Bayeux, around D5 or D6.
You have to remember one thing about all this. You’re only talking to a peanut. I was a little tiny speck when I was a lowly second lieutenant, a mere nothing.
We only had our own little bit of the area to look at and see. We didn’t know what was going on. I didn’t even know D-Day was going on.
You’re only talking to a peanut. I was a little tiny speck when I was a lowly second lieutenant, a mere nothing.
When I got on the boat to take the tanks over, I said to the chap, “Well, I am supposed to just put them on the ship, put the tanks on and anchor them down.”
I thought I had to get off to go and get some more tanks. This chap said, “Get off?” He says, “You’d better look through the porthole.” When I looked through the porthole, we were at sea. I asked where we were going and he said, “France, of course.”
That was my invasion of France. You have got to have secrecy in war, haven’t you?
The crew of a Sherman tank named ‘Akilla’ of 1st Nottinghamshire Yeomanry, 8th Armoured Brigade, after having destroyed five German tanks in a day, Rauray, Normandy, 30 June 1944.
Essentially, you mustn’t tell the other bloke what was happening. In the circumstances, that was secrecy gone barmy, because I had no idea and we just went to France. That was it. That’s how it went.
Then I joined a regiment I had never even heard of. The next thing was when the squadron leader placed me as a troop leader under instruction from a chap called Neville Fern. He was a lieutenant who had been with them for some time.
He had to go and do something else. So I did one day, D6, under instruction. You hear about the fighter pilots having only 25 hours flying – I had one day under instruction.
The next day I was in charge of the troop. I was in command of three tanks, in battle. We actually fought. We did some shooting on D6, the day I was under instruction.
But there’s nothing very clever about that. It just sort of happens. Suddenly you’re there doing it.
]]>He actually comes back and, even though he regrets the exuberance of peace for our time, he nevertheless refuses to accelerate British rearmament. Halifax and other cabinet ministers say, “You were very lucky this time. We must increase British rearmament,” but Chamberlain says, “But I brought back peace.”
This article is an edited transcript of Appeasing Hitler with Tim Bouverie on Dan Snow’s History Hit, first broadcast 7 July 2019.
So it was not an argument used by contemporaries, even if members of the Armed Forces were very much aware of the pitiful state that Britain’s arms were in.
Out-armed
It’s true, we did not have the Spitfire, we did not have the Hurricane. Even though they were being ordered, they weren’t ready yet. We didn’t have radar – all these things which made the difference between victory and defeat in the Battle of Britain.
But the breathing space was also used by the Germans. It’s not a zero sum game. They had the same opportunities, and if you look at the figures, it’s fairly clear that the Germans out-armed Britain and France, certainly on land and even in the air, as well as getting this huge trove of munitions (from the Skoda Works in Czechoslovakia).
So the breathing space argument I don’t think really holds, and not least because the diplomatic situation had become so much worse.
A significant number of Czech tanks, made at the Skoda Works, partook in the German invasion of France in 1940. Image Credit: Bundesarchiv / Commons.
The Soviets make their move
The Soviet Union who, as we know, in retrospect and as some contemporaries were saying, ultimately defeated the German army in the Second World War. and without them we would have been stuffed.
The Soviet Foreign Minister was constantly urging some form of anti-Nazi alliance with the West and was rebuffed, whereas by September 1939, Stalin has made an alliance with Hitler. We’re in a diplomatically and strategically worse position in September 1939 than we were a year earlier.
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