Kitchener arrived at Karari with enough time to build a defensive perimeter of stakes, thorn bushes and shallow trenches (known in North Africa as a zariba). He was supported by ten gunboats on the Nile, armed with thirty small artillery pieces and twenty-four Maxim machine guns. The land forces had forty-four guns and twenty machine guns. These were positioned to do maximum damage to any onrushing enemy. The army stayed on watch the night of 1 September expecting an attack at any moment, but not until early morning did scouts detect the whole Mahdist army on the march. Around 6.45 a.m., the first waves of rub’s, dressed all in white, wailing loudly and firing at random, ran across the barren plain towards the British zariba. A mix of artillery fire, accurate rifle fire and the machine guns ripped the attacking forces apart. Most died or were wounded at more than 1,000 metres from their goal, brought down by the long-range British Lee-Metford rifle. A few intrepid jihadiya got within 50 metres (160 feet) of the British line before their suicidal run was ended. A second wave attempted to attack from a different direction, but the onrushing soldiers were mown down in their turn. The plain was strewn with the dead and dying. Sudanese cavalry and infantry on the left wing under the Green Standard then attacked the British cavalry and the Camel Corps perched on the Karara hills at Abu Zariba, driving them north but unable to destroy them because of intense fire from two of the gunboats.
It was at this point that Kitchener sent off the 21st Lancers to round the Jebel Surgham hills to try to cut off any Mahdist retreat to Omdurman. Unknown to the British, Osman Digna and 2,000 soldiers were concealed behind the ridge in a small depression. The cavalry rode right into the trap. Their number included the young Winston Churchill, who would later write a two-volume account of the campaign in Sudan called The River War. Attacked on all sides, the lancers fought back, eventually dismounting and using their carbines to drive off the enemy, for the loss of one officer and twenty men. Meanwhile the remaining Black Standard and Green Standard warriors drove forward to meet the advancing British and Egyptian forces, suffering the same withering fire. The large contingent to the Mahdist far left under the young Shaykh al Din arrived too late to prevent the decimation of the Black Standard army under Amir Ya’qub, whose 12,000 men were slaughtered by the British battalions that were now on the move across the plain. When the final wave of horsemen and infantry attacked from the Karara hills, the forward British units, reinforced from the zariba, inflicted the same punishment. Some of the rub’s’ remaining soldiers rushed at the enemy unarmed, embracing death in their fight with the infidel.
This illustration by E Matthew Hale of the charge of the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman on 8 April 1898 was produced for Sir Evelyn Wood’s 1915 edition of British Battles on Land and Sea. As they rode over the low ridge, the lancers were surprised by the thousands of Sudanese soldiers concealed behind it.
By 11.00 a.m. the contest was over. The wounded Mahdists were shot or bayoneted as the British and Egyptian soldiers advanced, since it was argued that they continued to fire or slash with their swords even when immobilized by injury. An estimated 10,800 Mahdists were killed, 16,000 wounded. Kitchener’s losses were 47 dead and 434 wounded, testament to the efficiency of new forms of defensive firepower against which a mere mass of soldiers was helpless. Omdurman was occupied under a joint Anglo-Egyptian condominium, which lasted until 1956. One of the cavalrymen present on the day of the battle was the young Captain Douglas Haig. Eighteen years later he was ordering his own troops to run the gauntlet of artillery and machine guns across open ground in the first days of Battle of the Somme.
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No. 30 FALL OF SINGAPORE
8 December 1941 – 15 February 1942
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The greatest and most humiliating defeat of British Commonwealth forces during the Second World War came with the loss of Malaya and Singapore in the first weeks of the Japanese Pacific campaign. More than 130,000 men surrendered on 15 February, facing a Japanese army of around 35,000. The odds against the Japanese commander, General Tomoyuki Yamashita, were on paper considerable, but they were overcome in a battle in which the experienced Japanese armed forces exploited their formidable tactical skills to overcome the much larger numbers they confronted.
Singapore was a British island colony at the foot of the Malay Peninsula. It was at the heart of plans to defend the eastern Empire and Australasia against any likely threat. In the 1930s, a new naval base was constructed with formidable guns pointing out at sea. The island, with its population of almost one million Malays and Chinese, was expected to hold out against a siege for at least 180 days. Almost no thought had been given to an attack from the Malayan mainland across the Strait of Johore and the northern coast of the island remained unfortified. When it became clear in November 1941 that a clash with Japan was likely in the very near future, British plans were to defend Malaya on the northern border with Thailand, or even to cross into Thai territory if necessary. On 2 December 1941, two major warships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, arrived in Singapore Harbour to strengthen the British Empire position. On 6 December, a Japanese convoy was spotted along the coast of the Gulf of Siam. Unlike the American forces at Pearl Harbor on 7 December, the commanders at Singapore expected trouble.
The convoy was carrying Yamashita’s 25th Japanese Army and its supplies. Japanese aircraft were now based in neutral Thailand, within striking distance of Singapore, which was bombed on 8 December. The first Japanese forces landed on the coast of northern Malaya the same day. The Japanese army had a good deal of experience from the four-year war in China, while the British Empire forces, mainly drawn from the Indian army but with large contingents of British and Australian troops, had never fought the Japanese. The assumption was that they would not fight as effectively as European troops or troops led by white officers. When the governor of Singapore was told the news of invasion he retorted: ‘Well, I suppose you’ll shove the little men off.’ The ‘little men’ numbered at first little more than a division. After several days Yamashita had 26,000 men ashore, supported by a limited amount of artillery and a few tanks. Within days the position in northern Malaya was overrun. The Prince of Wales and Repulse, setting out unwisely from Singapore, were both sunk on 10 December. The RAF in Malaya and Singapore, armed with obsolete aircraft, were shot out of the skies by the more modern ‘Zero’ fighters.
At the start of the campaign, there were more than 80,000 British Empire forces supported by more artillery pieces than the Japanese and with generous supplies of ammunition. Yamashita relied on the battlefield skills of his infantry, who infiltrated at night, surrounded and isolated groups of enemy soldiers, created effective ambushes, and for much of the time took no prisoners. In hostile jungle terrain both sides faced problems, but the Japanese soldiers showed a determination and stamina not matched by the enemy. By the end of January, the British army commander, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, had to acknowledge defeat on the Malay Peninsula and ordered a withdrawal on the night of 30–31 January to the island of Singapore. Losses had been heavy, thanks to poor communication and the collapse of British air power. But Yamashita’s forces, with few reinforcements, had travelled 800 kilometres (500 miles) in 55 days, fighting all the way and increasingly short of ammunition. The British Empire garrison, on the other hand, was sent more than 20,000 additional men in January and February. Losses of 19,123 in the fighting in Malaya left a garrison on Singapore island of somewhere around 100,000, supported by artillery and 56 Hurricane fighters brought in by sea.
Yamashita had been so successful that Percival assumed he must have at least 150,000 men and 300 tanks, making the odds appear in his favour and encouraging the climate of demoralization. He estimated that the northeast of the island was the most likely point for a Japanese attack, when in fact Yamashita chose the northwest. Dummy installations were used to confuse the enemy, while Japanese preparations to throw the 5th and 18th Japanese Divisions across the Strait were concealed as much as possible. Percival put his largest
force in the northeast and the smaller Australian 22nd Brigade, already mauled from the long retreat down Malaya, along a wide stretch of coast in the northwest. Here on the night of 8–9 February, shadowy landing craft emerged from the gloom. Some were hit by machine-gun fire, but the orders to the artillery were not sent because communications had been cut by earlier Japanese shelling. The same tactics were used by Japanese soldiers to cut through and surround isolated enemy units, using bayonets when ammunition ran low. The Australian front broke and scattered units stumbled back to the line of the River Jurong in the centre of the island. Further east the Japanese Imperial Guards Division commanded by Lieutenant General Takumo Nishimura stole ashore and drove back the Australian 27th Brigade.
Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita (1885–1946) is seen here in 1944 while he was commander in the Philippines. Yamashita was the conqueror of Malaya in early 1942 but later paid for his successes with his life when he was executed as a war criminal.
Japanese soldiers guard British and Commonwealth prisoners following the fall of the city of Singapore on 15 February 1942. Around 130,000 surrendered to a Japanese force only half that size.
As resistance on the island crumbled, Winston Churchill sent a telegram to Percival calling for a fight to the death; commanders and officers, he wrote, ‘should die with their troops’. In reality, the mixed Empire force fell back in confusion on the perimeter of Singapore City. Percival co-ordinated operations poorly, communications were rudimentary, and a growing belief that the Japanese were simply unstoppable further contributed to a crisis of morale. On the dockside, deserters struggled to get on the few remaining vessels hurriedly leaving Singapore. Percival’s chief commanders recommended surrender as Japanese aircraft bombarded the civilian population. Yamashita’s force was in reality stretched thin and short of supplies of all kinds, but Percival finally accepted that he could not organize a proper defence and in the late afternoon of 15 February he met Yamashita to discuss terms. Bizarrely, the two men shook hands before Yamashita insisted on complete capitulation. The Japanese officers were astonished at what they found. Around 130,000 British Empire troops came into captivity, the largest number in British history. They had been outfought at every level by a force only a fraction of their number. The military ethos that permeated the Japanese army could not brook surrender but, despite Churchill’s exhortation, the British one could.
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No. 31 BATTLE OF SANTA CLARA
28 December 1958 – 1 January 1959
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The final decisive battle in the revolutionary war waged in Cuba by Fidel Castro’s 26th July Movement was fought by a group of around 300–50 guerrilla fighters commanded by the Argentinian former medical student, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, against an estimated 3,900 soldiers of the Cuban army and police force who were supported by ten tanks, an armoured train and B-26 bombers based in and around the town of Santa Clara in the centre of the island. The odds were overwhelmingly in favour of the army, but the revolutionary fighters were armed with great confidence that justice was on their side, while the men defending the crumbling regime of the dictator Fulgencio Batista were demoralized by the prospect of fighting against a revolution that now seemed on the brink of victory.
The road from hunted fugitive in the mountains of Cuba – following the landing of Castro’s rebel group in 1956 – to guerrilla leader poised to complete the revolution was a long and hard one for Che Guevara. By the summer of 1958, the revolutionary movement had grown larger and had won the tacit support of much of the poor rural population, but the 10,000-strong Cuban army remained a major obstacle. In August 1958, Guevara led one of three major guerrilla units to the central area of the island, Las Villas. It was a challenging and arduous trek, with few horses, beset by swarms of mosquitoes, many of the guerrilla fighters barefoot and trying to carry heavy equipment through wet, swampy ground. Guevara’s force arrived dispirited, ‘an army of shadows’ as he later described them. On 16 October, they finally reached the sanctuary of the Trinidad-Sancti Spiritus mountains and could rest. Over the next month, they attacked key communication points across the centre of the island, forcing small army or police garrisons to surrender. By December, they had succeeded in cutting major road and rail links. After capturing the small port of Caibarién, the column marched past the rail junction at Camajuani on the way to Santa Clara, where Batista’s army was gathered under the command of Colonel Joaquin Casillas Lumpuy. The rebels arrived outside the town on 29 December 1958.
Guevara, his arm in a sling after a fall in the capture of Caibarien, wearing his iconic black beret and an open-necked shirt, divided his small band into two groups. One was sent to intercept an armoured train laden with military supplies and men on its way to help Lumpuy. The attack was directed by the twenty-three-year-old Roberto Rodriguez (‘El Vaquerito’), commander of what Guevara called the Suicide Squad, chosen for dangerous missions and dedicated to the revolutionary cause. Fierce fighting around the Capiro Hills above the stationary train resulted in the death of an unknown number of guerrillas, including the eighteen-year-old Captain Gabriel Gil, who had been chosen to lead the assault, but the army commanders decided the train would be safer nearer to the barracks, and it set off along the rail route into Santa Clara. In the town itself, Guevara had set up his headquarters in the university and here he found tractors belonging to the School of Agriculture. The tractors were used to tear up the rail tracks so that the train would have to halt. The front carriages were derailed and the guerrillas attacked it with small arms fire and Molotov cocktails (‘an arm of extraordinary value’, wrote Guevara in his handbook on guerrilla warfare). After several hours sealed up in carriages made unbearably hot by the fires, the train commanders surrendered. Some of the 350 soldiers fraternized openly with the guerrillas. According to Guevara’s account, his band suddenly possessed twenty-two armoured cars, anti-aircraft guns, machine guns and ‘fabulous quantities of ammunition (fabulous, that is, to us)’.
This characteristic portrait of the guerrilla leader Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara (1928–67) was taken as he led the assault on the town of Santa Clara during the Cuban Revolution.
These new weapons certainly helped the second column in the city, commanded by Rolando Cubela, to capture key points in the northern quarters. The urban battle was quite different from the usual hit-and-run attacks the men had carried out in the Cuban countryside, but the group adjusted well to a prolonged fight, sheltered by buildings and primitive barricades built by sympathetic townspeople. On 30 December, a fierce gun battle raged around the police station, which was finally captured the following day, although ‘El Vaquerito’ died during the assault. The guerrillas laid siege to the army barracks of the Leoncio Vidal Regiment and the 31st Regiment of Rural Guard, which between them housed some 2,900 men. The army had tanks and air support, but the garrisons were demoralized and poorly led. The 31st Regiment surrendered and attention was then turned to the Grand Hotel. The guerrillas cleared all but the upper floor, from which snipers continued to fire until the rest of the town had been captured. The guerrillas, now with the open support of many of the townspeople, surrounded the Leoncio Vidal barracks and called on Casillas to surrender. On the morning of 1 January news arrived that Batista and his entourage had fled Cuba, leaving the garrison with little choice but to give up. A force almost ten times larger than Che Guevara’s original unit finally abandoned the struggle. Casillas and the police chief Cornelio Rojas were shot by the revolutionaries the following day. How many others died on the two sides has not been recorded.
The Battle of Santa Clara has gone down in Cuban mythology as the fight that ended the Batista dictatorship. It contributed to the popularity of Guevara himself, who was hailed as a military genius for winning the largest open battle between the rebels and the government. The fall of the regime was more complicated than this, since by late 1958 the loyalty of the army was in doubt and much of the island could no longer be defended against local guerrilla initiatives
. Much rested on the ability of the large armed force in Santa Clara to halt the decline and impose a punishing defeat on Guevara, but the Cuban regular army was full of disillusioned men, unwilling to die for Batista. The dictator was already getting ready to run.
This moral contrast was all-important, for the revolutionaries had no real military background, though they quickly learned how to make a Molotov cocktail, to lay explosives on a rail track, or to fire the weapons they captured. Guevara was by most accounts a stern and puritanical commander. He would not allow gambling or alcohol among his recruits and expected undeviating commitment to the cause. ‘The chiefs,’ he later wrote in his handbook, ‘must constantly offer the example of a pure and devoted life,’ while their men must display ‘valour, capacity and a spirit of sacrifice’. When he found that one of his troops had fallen asleep, having lost his gun, he sent the soldier back to the front line unarmed and told him to find another one. Guevara next saw the man a few moments before he died in the rough hospital set up for the injured, his new gun beside him. ‘It seemed to me,’ wrote Guevara, ‘that he was pleased to have proved his courage.’ The victory against the odds owed a good deal to the self-confidence of Guevara and his small band of followers that in the end numbers did not matter as much as the rightness of the cause.
A History of War in 100 Battles Page 15