by Karl Shaw
It was the issue of green coffee that caused the most aggravation. Coffee beans for the troops were sent to the Crimea unroasted, because there was less chance of the beans becoming damp or mouldy. But without any means of grinding or roasting the beans, the soldiers had to drink a concoction that was not only foul-tasting but was also harmful to their health.13
Not a single vegetable reached the British troops at the front. It was much the same with the issue of lime juice. It was a well-established fact by the time of the Crimean War that lime juice could prevent scurvy. A ship carrying 278 cases and 20,000 lbs of limes had been dispatched to the Crimea for general issue to the British troops. For three months, it sat untouched in Balaclava harbour. Everyone knew it was there, but no one knew whose job it was to tell the Army it had arrived. Meanwhile, the British camp was ravaged with scurvy.
Amid this chaos, there was also some fighting to be done, and this was where the British Army faced its biggest problem – lack of leadership. The British way of becoming an officer in the armed forces was to either buy a commission or, for some of the top positions, via appointment by politicians, who often selected their friends. Hence the highest ranks of the British Army were filled by elderly aristocrats vying to outdo each other to see who could achieve the most incompetence. Of Britain’s five infantry divisions in the Crimea, only one of the officers chosen to lead them was under sixty and he had never seen action before.14
In 1854, the combined British and French forces were advancing towards the Russian port of Sebastopol when they met the defending Russian Army near Balaclava. The Army was commanded by Fitzroy James Henry Somerset, Lord Raglan. The elderly Raglan hadn’t seen combat since losing an arm at Waterloo more than forty years earlier and had never commanded an Army in the field before.15 He was appointed because it was his turn and nobody objected. It didn’t help that he kept referring to the French as “the enemy”. His senior officers had to keep reminding him that this time the French were on his side – the Russians were the enemy. The fate of the Light Brigade would hinge on Raglan’s ability to articulate a clear order.
The British had a large amount of cavalry at Balaclava but the Russians countered with an impressive array of guns and artillery. The defenders also had control of the valley. The one-armed Raglan peered across the landscape from his high vantage point on a hill and could see Russians in the distance trying to drag away some captured British cannons. Raglan sent down an order to his Lieutenant-General, George Charles Bingham, the third Earl of Lucan, to recover them. Lord Lucan had just returned after seventeen years in retirement. Famously dim, he was much more concerned with the appearance of his cavalry than the actual business of waging war. He spent more on uniforms than the actual wage bill for the men who wore them.
The order to attack was given to Captain Lewis Edward Nolan for delivery. Nolan was chosen because he was one of the best horsemen in the cavalry and would be able take a speedy, more direct route down to Lucan. He was a “merit” officer with barely disguised contempt for his elderly aristocratic superiors. He had also written a book about cavalry tactics and wanted everybody to know it. The order handed to Nolan read: “Lord Raglan wishes the Cavalry to advance rapidly to the front, follow the enemy, and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns. Troop Horse Artillery may accompany. French Cavalry is on your left. Immediate.”
Now, the order made perfect sense if you were on top of the hill and could see everything that was going on, but Lucan was in a position 600 feet lower than Raglan and didn’t have the same view. When he read the order from Nolan, he was baffled. Which guns was he supposed to attack? He asked Nolan for clarification. Like Lord Raglan, Nolan had seen the location of the guns that were obscured from Lucan’s view, but instead of pointing directly to where they were, he simply gestured in the general direction of the Russians and said; “There, my Lord, is your enemy. There are your guns.” Nolan repeated that the order was to attack immediately then trotted off. Lucan, who didn’t see eye to eye with the arrogant Nolan, didn’t bother to ask for further clarification.
The only guns Lucan could actually see were at the far end of the valley, where masses of Russian cavalry were concentrated. He assumed that these were the guns he was supposed to attack. Lucan rode over to James Burdened, the seventh Earl of Cardigan,16 the commander of the Light Brigade – “light” because they were lightly armed, as opposed to the “heavy brigade”.
Cardigan was thought by some to be actually mad, possibly the result of a near-fatal blow on the head in a childhood riding accident – “His progression through the Army was marked by many episodes of extraordinary incompetence” is just one of many references to him. He was, even by the standards of the English aristocracy, highly eccentric. He was subject to flights of terrible rage and was a famous stickler for “proper form”. In 1840, Cardigan was embroiled in an extraordinary Victorian officers’ mess dispute known as “The Black Bottle Affair” – a difference of opinion over the correct receptacle for decanting wine. Cardigan had a fellow officer arrested because he had placed a black bottle of moselle on a table instead of a decanter. When an account of the incident was leaked to the Morning Chronicle, Cardigan challenged its author, Captain Harvey Tuckett, to a duel on Wimbledon Common. Tuckett was injured and the Earl was tried in the House of Lords, but acquitted for lack of evidence. Tuckett conveniently failed to appear and, it was generally assumed, had been bought off.
Lucan and Cardigan despised each other. Cardigan was married to Lucan’s youngest sister but they were now separated. The animosity between the two men was well documented; they often came close to trading blows in front of their own troops. So there was no small-talk or discussion about tactics; Lucan simply pointed down the valley and ordered Cardigan to attack. When Cardigan mentioned the obvious flaw in Lucan’s plan – i.e. that the valley was heavily defended by Russian guns – Lucan merely told Cardigan to ride at moderate speed so as not to exhaust the horses. Lucan would follow up with the Heavy Brigade. Lucan and Cardigan both knew that the order was suicidal, but neither wanted to lose face. So instead of ignoring an absurd order to attack from their elderly and incompetent commander-in-chief, both men just got on with it.
Leading the charge, Cardigan followed his orders with his customary parade-ground formality and discipline. He was taking his 673 men into a narrow valley a mile-and-a-quarter long. Russian gunners were at the end and on both sides, forming a ‘valley of death’.
Nolan was the first to die as he charged to the front when a shell burst nearby and a chunk of shrapnel hit him squarely in the chest. He may have been trying to ride forward to warn Cardigan he was heading in the wrong direction, although some historians dispute this.17
To the Russians, the manoeuvre appeared to be of such unfathomable stupidity that they assumed the British were all drunk. In fact, some of Cardigan’s men did manage to get through to the guns, but were then surrounded by the Russian troops. When they turned to retreat, they were easy targets. The slaughter took about twenty minutes and cost about a third of the attacking force. The commander of the French cavalry, General Bosquet, summed up the unfolding disaster most accurately. “C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre . . .” – “It is magnificent, but it is not war.”
The first the British public knew about all this was two days later when they read about it over breakfast in The Times. It wasn’t even the headline story. The paper’s war correspondent William Howard Russell, who had wired news of the event home by telegraph, buried it in a general piece about the war, but it was still hard not to notice that, of the 673 men who had charged down the valley at Balaclava, only 195 had returned alive and 500 horses had been killed. It was a good thing, of course, that for the first time these aristocratic blunders were not going unreported. Unfortunately, Russell’s uncensored reports were also being read by the Russians who got everything they needed to know about British troop movements by reading the morning paper.
In the post mortem that
followed, everyone vigorously tried to smear each other. Raglan blamed Lucan for losing the Light Brigade; almost everyone else blamed Lord Cardigan because he had led the actual charge straight into the cannon battery; Cardigan blamed Lucan, who, in turn, blamed the dead Nolan for the vagueness of delivery of the orders. The one thing everyone agreed on is that the charge was an unmitigated disaster. Nearly 500 British soldiers died because their arrogant and incompetent commanders were no longer on speaking terms. But Balaclava was soon being subtly rewritten as a story of British heroism against all odds. This was what the British public wanted to hear – a symbol of heroic failure, self-sacrifice and great devotion to duty. Alfred Lord Tennyson confirmed this new slant on the story with his poem The Charge of the Light Brigade, which quickly became famous throughout the world as a story of great heroism against the odds. Sixty years later, the poets of the First World War would look upon this kind of tactical blunder very differently.
Miraculously, Lord Cardigan returned home almost unscathed from the Crimea as a hero and an unlikely fashion icon.18 Ironically, he died fourteen years later after falling off his horse while taking his regular morning ride.
Longest War Without Anyone Getting Hurt
On 29 September 1883, the Spanish King, Alfonso XII, was riding through Paris on a State visit when he was rudely abused and stoned by the Parisian mob.19 When reports of the royal snub reached Lijar, a small town in southern Spain, the mayor, Don Miguel Garcia Saez, was outraged. He was so angry that, on 14 October, he and the whole of Lijar (population 300) declared war on France.
During the ensuing hostilities, not a single shot was fired and no casualties were sustained on either side. In 1981, a full ninety-eight years later, Lijar decided it was time to let bygones be bygones and agree a ceasefire with France. “We have forgiven them now,” said the Mayor, Diego Sanchez, “making this the first time in two centuries that France fought a war and didn’t lose.”
“So many centuries after the Creation it is unlikely that anyone could find hitherto unknown lands of any value.”
Committee advising King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain regarding a proposal by Christopher Columbus, 1486
Most Clueless US Commander
The American Civil War was not short of amusingly incompetent characters on both sides. The Union Army commander-in-chief, Winfield Scott, was too fat to mount a horse or even climb into a train, so he effectively handed command to Robert E. Lee, who repaid his faith by quickly resigning and joining the enemy. Scott planned to starve the South into submission by blocking all of their ports, despite the fact that he didn’t have enough ships to mount and sustain a blockade of the Confederate’s 3,000-mile coastline.
The US Confederate, General Thomas J. Jackson, had several nicknames before he earned his new handle “Stonewall” at the first battle of Bull Run by sitting astride his horse “like a stone wall” while bullets flew around him. When he was a junior officer, he wore his thick army greatcoat throughout a long and very hot summer because he had not received an order to do otherwise. He was also a strict Presbyterian, hence the nickname “Deacon Jackson”. His deep religious convictions also meant that he refused to fight on Sundays. During the thick of the battle of Mechanicsville in 1862, Jackson spent the day praying alone on a nearby hill, refusing to speak to anyone, while his troops took heavy casualties. He was accidentally shot by his own men during the battle of Chancellorsville and died from complications a week later.
The Union general, Ambrose Everett Burnside, was famous for two things: the most ridiculous-looking facial hair 20 and the most awesome incompetence on either side in the war. It was said that no numerical or tactical advantage was so great that he could not throw it away.
In September 1862, Burnside sent his men across the Antietam Creek using a thirty-eight-metre-long narrow stone bridge; it was just wide enough for two soldiers to walk side by side. The crossing was slow, making them easy targets for Confederate sharpshooters, who lined up on a nearby ridge and shot them for fun. Most of Burnside’s men were killed. If he had been slightly better prepared, he would have known that that river he was trying to cross was only waist deep.
A month later, Burnside was rewarded for his failure with a promotion, although he had turned down two earlier offers of promotion because he didn’t think he was up to it. The Battle of Fredericksburg proved him right.
In December 1862, the Confederate Army was dug in along the heights overlooking the town of Fredericksburg. Burnside ordered a series of assaults that accomplished nothing, except the deaths of another 12,000 of his men.
The following January, Burnside was in action again when he decided to initiate a risky winter campaign. He sent his men on a long march, right at the start of a four-day deluge of freezing rain. By the end of the first day, the roads were rivers of mud, clogged with the bodies of exhausted dead horses and the artillery and wagons they were pulling. Meanwhile, as Burnside’s men staggered along, soaked, freezing and starving, Confederate soldiers watched with amusement from the other side of the Rappahannock River, taunting them with signs made from bed sheets: “Burnside, stuck in the mud”. Burnside abandoned the campaign, but not before hundreds of his men died of exhaustion and exposure.
He managed to top even this suicidal tactic in June 1864. At Petersburg, Burnside’s men were stuck in a line of trenches. In front of them, just 100 yards away, was a rebel fort dominating a sloping ridge. One of the regiments under Burnside’s command was the 46th Pennsylvanian Volunteers, a force primarily made up of miners. He ordered them to undermine the enemy defences by digging a trench and filling it with explosives. Burnside’s plan was that, once the mine was detonated, his men would jump out of their trenches, run up the hill and rush the fort, taking advantage of the outright panic and confusion that would ensue in the Confederate lines.
The charge detonated, killing at least 278 Confederate soldiers and creating a crater 170 feet long, 60–80 feet wide and 30 feet deep. As the dust cleared, Burnside’s men charged up the hill and jumped into the crater to take cover, only to find they couldn’t climb out again. The Confederates were more than a little surprised to find the whole enemy force trapped at their feet in a big hole. As a result. 3,793 Union soldiers were killed, wounded or captured.
On hearing of this latest manoeuvre, Abraham Lincoln noted, “Only Burnside could have managed such a coup, wringing one last spectacular defeat from the jaws of victory.”
Most Embarrassing Friendly Fire Incident
On 29 March 1942, the British cruiser Trinidad was escorting a convoy in the Arctic when it was attacked by three German destroyers. The Trinidad returned fire by launching a torpedo attack. It was such a cold day that two of the three torpedoes were iced up and failed to leave their tubes; the third torpedo malfunctioned because the oil in its motor and gyroscope had frozen. When it was fired, it turned around in a wide circle and headed back the way it had come, hitting the cruiser amidships, with the loss of thirty-two men.
The ship that torpedoed herself was towed clear and limped back to Murmansk where she was partially repaired, but on her way back to Britain she was bombed and another sixty-three men died. This time, damage was such that it was decided to scuttle her and HMS Matchless torpedoed the unlucky ship, sending it to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.
“No one will pay good money to get from Berlin to Potsdam in one hour when he can ride his horse there in one day for free.”
King William I of Prussia on hearing of the invention of trains, 1864
Most Disastrous Lack of Strategy
“Hurrah, boys, we’ve got them!”
George Armstrong Custer, just before the battle of the Little Bighorn
If the last word in British military bone-headedness was Lord Cardigan’s Charge of the Light Brigade, the American equivalent was George Armstrong Custer’s so-called “last stand” at the Little Bighorn. At least Lord Cardigan could offer the excuse that he was following orders; Custer had no one to blame but h
imself.
The career of Lieutenant-Colonel George Armstrong Custer – he had “borrowed” the rank of General – got off to a flying start when he finished bottom out of a class of thirty-four at West Point Military School. He was such a useless student that Custer himself admitted that his time there should be studied by future cadets as an example to be avoided.
Normally, this would have ensured that his military career was over before it even began, or at best got him a safe posting to some far-flung outpost, but Custer was lucky to have graduated just after the start of the Civil War and the US Army was desperate for trained officers. He soon found himself reporting for duty as a Second Lieutenant in the US 2nd Cavalry.
By all accounts, he seems to have been a highly emotional man, given to grand gestures and speeches, but he also showed himself to be a brave, albeit reckless, soldier – he had only one military tactic: “Charge!” But his coolness under fire caught the eye of his superiors and he rose swiftly through the ranks. At the age of twenty-four, two years almost to the day of graduating from West Point, he was made a brigadier general and given command of a cavalry brigade from Michigan.
As the battles came and went, Custer’s fame grew, thanks to his flair for self-promotion. He was as vain as he was ambitious, instantly recognizable by his non-regulation uniform of black velvet trimmed with gold lace, crimson necktie and a white hat, although he said he only wore this so that his men could easily see him in battle. After leading one successful charge, he wrote in his report in typical Custer fashion: “I challenge the annals of warfare to produce a more brilliant or successful charge of cavalry.”