by Karl Shaw
Embarrassingly, when the conflict was formally concluded at the 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty negotiations, nobody remembered Andorra. And since no peace treaty was enacted, Andorra remained technically in a state of war with Germany for the next twenty-five years. The oversight was discovered in 1939 when a separate peace treaty was concluded, formally ending Andorra’s state of war against Germany and ending its involvement in the First World War.
The government of Andorra sensibly decided to sit out the Second World War.
Most Underperforming Battleship
“Second to God, the welfare of the kingdom depends on its navy.”
So said the Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus, famed as “the Lion of the North”. Accordingly, in 1628 he ordered construction of the biggest warship the world had ever seen – the mighty Vasa. The king designed it personally, with the shipbuilders at Stockholm instructed to follow his blueprint to the letter. A thousand oaks went into building her hull; her masts would be fifty metres high and she would be adorned with five hundred sculptures decorated with gold leaf – to impress foreigners. Even more impressively, she would carry sixty-four massive guns to blow away any unfortunate foreign ship she came across.
As it turns out, trusting your king to design a ship instead of the people whose job it is to make ships is not such a great idea. The shipbuilders realized immediately that the Vasa would be top-heavy. Worse still, it was so narrow across her bottom that no amount of ballast could rectify the problem.
Before her first sailing, a stability test was carried out. With the ship tied up, thirty of the crew were ordered to run backwards and forwards across her deck. The Vasa swayed so alarmingly that after just three runs the test was halted before she keeled over. Admiral Klas Fleming, who ordered the test, is reported to have said, “If only His Majesty were at home.” Unfortunately, the king was not at home – he was away leading his Army in Prussia and was keen to see his very big ship join the Baltic fleet. And nobody, not even an admiral, was about to disappoint him.
On 10 August 1628, the magnificent Vasa set sail on her maiden voyage. It was a beautiful summer’s day and most of Stockholm came down to the city harbour to watch. All around the Vasa was a small flotilla of sailing boats bedecked with flags and full of well-wishers, including civic dignitaries and wives and children of the crew.
The Vasa sailed for just one nautical mile, then the whole thing tipped over and majestically sank. The biggest and most expensive battleship ever built couldn’t cope with a modest gust of wind. The portholes for the cannons were so close to the waterline that, as the ship swayed, the ocean flowed freely into its underbelly. Within minutes, the Vasa and between thirty and fifty crew were on the seabed.5
An inquiry was organized by the Swedish privy council to find out who was responsible for the disaster. Unsurprisingly, since King Gustavus Adolphus had personally approved all measurements and armaments, in the end no one was punished for the fiasco and it was put down to an “act of God”.
Despite the chastening experience of the Vasa, in the 1700s warships continued to get bigger and bigger, until Spain decided to build the largest of all, the Santísima Trinidad. It carried a massive 140 cannons and was so heavy it could only move at a crawl, giving rise to its nickname el Ponderoso – The Ponderous. So many men were needed to man it that its supplies ran out very quickly unless it was near a friendly port. The Santísima Trinidad served at the Battle of Trafalgar but was too slow to make an impact and it eventually surrendered to the British fleet. The day after the battle it capsized in a storm due to its high centre of gravity.
Worst Military Aircraft
Most people know about the classic aircraft designs of the Second World War – the Spitfire, the Mustang, the Lancaster. But there were hundreds of aircraft types used on both sides and many were failures. One stands above the rest as the most remarkable failure of all.
Benito Mussolini’s most difficult job during the Second World War was getting Italians to fight, a problem he attributed to eating too much pasta.6 But Il Duce had a secret weapon – the Lynx ground-attack aircraft was his pride and joy. It had a sleek, streamlined design and retractable undercarriage, both of which were highly advanced for the time. When it made its début in 1937, it set two world speed records, scoring a great propaganda victory. The military potential of the Lynx was obvious; it was a fast, had good range, and would have made a perfect reconnaissance plane. But Mussolini decided it should carry bombs.
As soon as it took on the extra weight of weapons, armour plating and equipment, the effect on its performance and handling was disastrous. This quickly became apparent when it was first used against French airfields in Corsica and was found to have all the speed and agility of a flying hippo, but it was the only heavy fighter available to the Italian Air Force so sixty-four were sent to North Africa. The addition of sand filters robbed the aircraft of what little power it had left, to a point where it became useless. In 1940, an attack on a British airfield had to be aborted when the fully laden Lynx failed to reach operational height or maintain formation.
Far from being a world record-setter, the Lynx could now only just about reach half its claimed speed and even then had to set off in the direction of its destination because it lacked the power to make a banking turn. The operational career of the Lynx was aborted.
In a final ignominy, the remaining aircraft were parked up and used as decoys for attacking Allied aircraft. Others were sent to the scrap yard straight from the factory, thus completing the career of the most embarrassingly awful aircraft ever to see combat.
Most Literal Taste of Defeat
General Marcus Licinius Crassus was one of the most respected and honoured elder statesmen of the Roman republic. He was known as “the richest man in Rome” and was possibly one of the wealthiest men in all history.7
Despite his great riches, Crassus wasn’t satisfied. More than anything he craved recognition for his military achievements. He wanted to be remembered as Rome’s greatest general, more celebrated even than his peers Julius Caesar and Pompey, whom he believed had stolen all the glory for his defeat of the Spartans.
In 54 BC, at the age of sixty, Crassus decided to have one last shot at the title, leaving his idyllic, powerful, wealthy lifestyle to lead an Army on a 1,500-mile trek across the Adriatic, over Asia Minor and into the wastelands of Mesopotamia to fight the Parthians.
Nobody else in Rome, certainly not the Senate, wanted a war with Parthia. It was no great threat to Rome and, in fact, there was a peace treaty signed between the two countries. But Crassus hated being in the shadow of Pompey and Caesar and decided to attack anyway.
On paper, Crassus’s Army should easily have been able to overwhelm the Parthians. He had at his disposal 20,000 of arguably the best infantry in the world, plus around 4,000 horsemen armed with spears and another 6,000 horsemen under his ally Artabazus, the king of Armenia. The total force was four times that of the Parthian force, which was entirely made up of archers on horseback.
The sensible and most obvious route for Crassus would be to take his infantry into Parthia through a chain of Armenian mountains where the Parthian cavalry would be at a disadvantage. But Crassus was impatient for a quick victory and was determined to take the faster route across some flat valleys – ideal terrain for cavalry and the worst possible place for his infantry to meet the Parthian horsemen head on. He also entrusted himself to a local “guide” who led him straight into a Parthian trap.
Although outnumbered by four to one, the Parthians were fine horsemen and world-class archers. They could ride and fire at the same time and were able to shoot as well backwards as they could forwards. They rode in circles around the Romans, firing volley after volley of arrows. Bewildered by this style of combat, Crassus sent wave after wave of his foot soldiers, all wearing heavy armour and carrying swords and spears, to chase after the Parthian horsemen. The Parthians would get within shooting range, rain a barrage of arrows down upon Crassus’s troops, turn
, fall back and charge with another attack.
In the ensuing bloodbath, Crassus was killed along with his son and about 20,000 Romans. One legend has it that the Parthians captured him alive and poured molten gold down his throat to cure his thirst for gold. Many of his generals committed suicide rather than fight on hopelessly. A further 10,000 were taken alive and sold into slavery. Parthian losses came out to about 100.
Crassus lost the standards of his seven legions to the enemy. It took an embarrassing twenty-seven years to negotiate their return. Having pursued an unnecessary war, the greedy Crassus earned for himself a place in history as the most disastrous general Rome had ever produced.
Least Convincing Excuse for a War
In 1325, rivalry between the Italian city states of Modena and Bologna got out of control when a band of Modena soldiers thought it would be really amusing if they raided Bologna (about thirty miles away) and stole their civic wooden bucket.
Bologna, hoping to restore both its bucket and its pride, promptly declared war on Modena. The so-called War of the Bucket raged on for 12 years and an estimated 2,000 people lost their lives, but Bologna never did get its bucket back. The war was a decisive Modenese victory and the bucket remains to this day in their town hall.
Barring bouts of Italian stupidity, the silliest pretext for an armed conflict was the War of Jenkins Ear. In 1739, relations between Britain and Spain were on a knife edge. Hostility between the countries had been bubbling up for decades, each accusing the other of stealing their trade routes and wanting to steal their colonies. But despite the odd minor skirmish, the British Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, defied public opinion and kept Britain out of a war.
Then a man called Robert Jenkins presented himself before Parliament. He had a severed and very shrivelled left ear in his pocket and a tale to tell. Some eight years earlier he had been the captain of a commercial trading ship, the Rebecca, sailing off the coast of Cuba. On 9 April 1731, some Spanish coast guards, suspecting that the Rebecca was carrying smuggled goods, boarded the vessel and demanded to inspect the ship’s cargo and its manifest. When they found contraband aboard the ship, the Spanish captain drew his sword and cut off Captain Jenkins’ ear. According to Jenkins, the Spaniard said, “Were the King of England here . . . I would do the same for him!”
It’s not entirely clear why Jenkins waited eight years before he made his complaint or, for that matter, why he had the ear pickled and carried it around with him. What is clear is that his aural mishap was simply the last straw. Parliament was outraged and Walpole was obliged to declare war on Spain.
The War of Jenkins’ Ear lasted three years from 1739–41 and, as wars go, didn’t amount to much. But because Europe was a mesh of alliances and political intrigue, the War of Jenkins’ Ear erupted into the War of Austrian Succession, which in turn erupted into a truly global conflict called the Seven Years War.
Three wars and two million dead . . . over an ear. There’s even some doubt about whether Jenkins had really lost his ear in the way he’d said he had in the first place.
Most Futile Display of Bravery
“This is a story about the English and the French and why the English hate the French. Which is because they eat frogs, they smell bad, and they’re twenty-five miles away.”
William Ellis
In the early fourteenth century, armoured knights on horseback reigned supreme on the battlefield. They were the ultimate killing machine, the medieval equivalent of a battle tank. At the battle of Crécy, however, they were about to receive a very rude shock.
In 1346, England was at war with France – again – this time under the reign of King Edward III. Edward became king aged just fifteen but he didn’t let his youth and inexperience hold him back. In 1333, while still a teenager, he won a great victory over the Scots. This was mightily impressive, but beating the Welsh and the Scots was one thing; if you really wanted to be remembered as a truly great English king, you had to inflict a crushing and humiliating defeat on the French. Against all odds, that’s exactly what Edward III was able to do and then some.
Edward was spoiling for a scrap with the French and thought he would stir things up a bit in 1337 by declaring himself King of France, a claim based on the fact that his mother was the sister of the old king, whereas the new King Philip VI of France was merely the former king’s cousin. To Edward’s annoyance, Philip didn’t take the bait. In 1340, however, Edward found the excuse he needed to invade France to protect England’s wool trade in Flanders.
Taking on the kingdom of France was a formidable challenge. It was much bigger and more prosperous than England with a population five times as great. France could also count on the support of a number of smaller allies who were prepared to provide troops in time of war.
In the early fourteenth century, the armoured knight was thought be close to invincible. The knights of France were the greatest of all, both in number and splendour. The best a well-disciplined infantry could hope for was to kill or frighten his horse then surround the de-horsed knight and pick at him until they got a dagger between his armour. His only other vulnerability lay in attacks from bowmen, but a line of bowmen was thought to be no match for a charge of knights on horseback protected by plate armour, visored helmets and shields armed with lances, two-handed swords, battle-axes and maces.
But Edward had acquired a secret weapon from his recent wars against the Welsh – their deadly longbows. Made of yew and 6-foot long they could fire iron-tipped, armour-piercing arrows 250 yards with murderous accuracy at a rate of twelve arrows a minute. It was crucial to Edward’s war effort and he needed all the longbowmen he could get, but they were difficult weapons to master and it took years of practice to be able to fire one properly. Accordingly, he banned all sports except archery on pain of death. It is actually possible to identify the skeletons of longbowmen from their bone spurs and overdeveloped left arms.
He finally got to try his longbows out for real on several thousand French knights at Crécy in 1346. Edward had an Army of around 8,500 fighting men of whom 5,000 were bowmen. The French Army, led by King Philip VI, had 12,000 French, German, Bohemian and Spanish knights. Riding with Philip were three kings – Charles, King of the Romans; Jaime II of Mallorca; and John of Bohemia. It was the largest assembly of knighthood ever seen on a medieval battlefield and the cream of European nobility.
There were so many competing egos on the field that Philip wasn’t completely in control. The battle kicked off when 4,000 Genoese mercenaries with crossbows opened fire on the English line of attack. No one knows for sure if Philip ordered the attack, or if the Genoese just decided to wade in.
The Genoese crossbow was also a formidable weapon, but it was cumbersome to use, slow to load and didn’t have the range of a longbow. Much to the amusement of Edward, the Genoese crossbow volley fell short and the English returned fire with their longbows. The Genoese had never experienced anything like it. Crossbowmen were trained to slaughter infantry, not exchange fire with people who could actually shoot back. They retreated in panic, many cutting their bowstrings and throwing down their weapons. The sight of this angered Philip so much he called out to his mounted knights, “Quick now, kill all that rabble! They are only getting in our way!” So Philip’s knights waded into the struggling Genoese archers, hacking their way through them as they went.
Meanwhile, into the middle of this Edward’s longbowmen continued to rain a hailstorm of arrows so dense, according to a French chronicler, that it blotted out the Sun. An estimated 60,000 arrows were hitting Philip’s knights every minute. But the rules of chivalry dictated that knights should only fight their equals on the battlefield, so instead of attacking the people who were doing all the damage, Philip’s knights largely ignored the longbowmen and went for the English knights.
By the end of the day, Edward had won a stunning victory. A small and completely outnumbered English Army had devastated not just the French Army, but the French aristocracy. Less than 300 Englishmen were k
illed while the French death toll exceeded 30,000, including 11 princes, an archbishop and 1,200 knights and noblemen.
There were two more battles – at Poitiers in 1356, and Agincourt in 1415 – where French knights lost heavily to English longbowmen, but Crécy is credited as being the point in history where the concept of chivalry in warfare and the dominance of the knight on horseback ended for ever. But the age of chivalry went down fighting, because Crécy is also famous for one final, spectacularly futile act of bravery.
King John “The Blind” of Bohemia, an ally of the French King Philip, had lost his eyesight a decade earlier to an eye infection while fighting in Lithuania, but he didn’t want to miss out on the action. He ordered his men to strap him into his saddle and point him in the direction of the enemy. He rode into the fray and somehow made it to the top of the slope, then, unsurprisingly, he was very quickly killed along with the fifteen knights who escorted him. Before he set off, he was reported to have said, “Let it never be the case that a Bohemian king runs from a fight.”
His gesture was not entirely in vain. According to tradition, the King of England’s son, the ‘Black Prince’, was so impressed by this display of lunacy that he decided to adopt8 King John’s personal crest of three white ostrich feathers and his motto “Ich Dien” (I serve) as his own. It is the Prince of Wales’s motto to this day.
Least Successful Espionage Mission
The Tower of London has seen off many an illustrious traitor – the German spy Josef Jakobs wasn’t among them. Jakobs was parachuted into a field in Huntingdonshire, England, on 31 January 1941, but was spotted in his descent by the local Home Guard who raced to his landing point to detain him. They could have taken their time, because Jakobs had broken his ankle upon landing and was immobile. Still wearing his German flying suit, he was carrying forged papers, a radio and a German sausage. That was the end of his espionage mission.