[1] Britain’s Greatest Battle shall be the epithet by which Adlertag is long remembered. At the height of the Darkest Hour, as the men of the Few locked horns with the Luftwaffe over the Channel, Hitler finally lost patience waiting for the RAF to crack. He gave Goering one more month to break the RAF before Operation Sea Lion began; and the foppish overconfident Reichsmarschall rose daringly to his greatest humiliation. With its pilots already stretched after 11 months near constant combat flights, Goering threw them once more in the fray on Adlertag, the start of his newest campaign to take Britain’s skies.
Over 12 hours, more than 100 German aircraft were shot down over Southern England. The RAF buckled, but it held, despite heavy loses and damage on the ground. Reports that went back to OKW were confused, yet Goering managed to spin it that has plan was working, more attacks followed over the coming days that seemed to back up his buoyant mood. Yet, they were deceived, as with anticipation of the invasion, Fighter Command began covertly evacuating personnel and equipment out of Kent and the South Coast with Leigh-Mallory’s ‘Big Wings’ being suspended for the duration in anticipation of the large-scale German landings.
Adlertag was on paper a great victory, but the role it would play in luring the Third Reich into its most stinging loss of the War thus far, is by comparison legendary. Much like the 2nd Battle of Jutland did to the Kreigsmarine, Adlertag left the Luftwaffe crippled emotionally and operationally. Goering would never hold the confidence of the Fuhrer again, and his pride and joy would only be thought of as bus service for supplies and a glorified extension of the Wehrmacht’s artillery arm.
[2] Better known as the Iraq War, Operation Vantage was high watermark for the ‘British Revival’ of the late 50’s and early 60’s and the beginning of the end of Projection of Power to the East of Suez. The Kuwait crisis began with the regime change in Iraq by the nationalist officers in the army, who consequently laid claim to the oil Sheikdom. Iraq’s economy had been in ruins since the War, and the military men in charge now turned to a military solution to secure their positions and fortunes by invading the British protectorate.
In London, Prime Minister Gaitskell despatched a fleet to the Gulf to warn off the Iraqis, a bold move considering the global reaction to the Suez Affair 5 years prior, however (not that anyone knew what it meant at the time) Hugh Gaitskell was not Rab Butler. Feeling antagonized rather than intimidated by the arrival of a British Carrier group in the Gulf, the Baghdad clique ordered their army to storm Kuwait. Across the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, British ships, men, aircraft, and equipment were all rushed in to prop up the Kuwaitis.
With the aid of the smaller ad hoc formations of the Kuwait Armed Forced, the Iraqi offensive was halted against the odds and resolve in Baghdad failed as Moscow refused to interfere and Washington (for a change) stepped up to back the British. By the end of July, the Arab League sent a combined declaration demanding Iraq withdraw, and by August Jordan and Syria, with Egyptian air support, crossed their borders into Iraq, in tandem with a stunning counter offensive that broke moral of the Iraqi forces in Kuwait, forcing their withdrawal. A revolution spread throughout Iraq, prompting the rise of the Ba’ath Party to power, who renounced their ambitions and consequently signed the Ankara Protocols on 13th August as the official peace agreement. More controversial after the fact than at the time, unlike the other war of the period, Vantage has long been justified even by the words of the left-wing, with the words of MP Michael Foot: “I know fascists when I see them…”. Vantage is remembered unofficially as the last “good” war.
[3] As tank battles go, there have been bigger and there are more famous examples, even by the standards of the British, however few have had the impact and few were as well fought and important as the work done by the Ninth Army in the Spring of ‘43, as it checked and drove back the Third Reich from its furthest reach. By 1943, the war in the deserts had been thought long over, however, when Army Group South finally broke through the Caucuses and followed the Red Army into Iran, the Allies responded in kind.
More than 10 allied nations, including the USSR, fought in the battle but it was the British who were there in largest numbers under Auchinleck. There are those detractors who claim that the battle had already been won on paper, that the Germans were well passed their culminating point, and supply and fuel stocks were critical, yet moral was high and these were some of the best equipped units in the Wehrmacht.
Nevertheless, the number, versatility and reliability of Allied armour soon proved that the decisive factor, as the advance around the shores Lake Urmia took apart and placed in the bag 1. Panzerarmee, forcing it into a retreat that didn’t stop at the border, but in tandem with the larger and more famous Battles of Orel, Astrakhan and the Stalingrad counter-offensive forced the Germans to give up all the ground captured since the summer of 1942.
[4] The culmination of the new Entente strategy on the Western Front as it unleashed for the first time en-masse tank formations against the German fortifications along the Hindenburg Line. At St Quentin, at the crux of where the British and French lines met, a quiet section of the front considering how formidable and entrenched the German positions. More than 850 British, French, and American armoured vehicles, backed up by a reserve of another 200, 4 corps of infantry, and a cavalry corps fell upon the German lines in late August.
A sudden bombardment was followed by the wedge of tanks driving over No-Man’s land, and German regiments broke and ran, as the tank drove into battle for the second time. The advance only stopped once they reached the canals and Somme River, but engineers were soon brought up and the advance continued. New light ‘Whippet’ tanks and cavalry were also let loose, leaving the main advance and artillery behind, as the German retreat became a rout, with whole divisions forced to pull back on foot after railheads and rolling stock were captured.
It's defences on the Western Front compromised, more attacks to the South and North, and the usual effective counterattacks breaking up against the wall of armour, the writing was on the wall for the Central Powers, as the former rosy outlook for 1918 after Brest-Litovsk looked bleak in the face of another bad winter, further tank attacks, the arrival of America in force. On 21 March 1918, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg signed the armistice declaration with Marshal Petain (France), Admiral Jellicoe (Britain), and General Funston (USA).
[5] The brainchild of future PM Winston Churchill and Kitchener, the decision to launch amphibious landings at the elbow of the Ottoman Empire and cut it in two was a bold one. At a time when the war in the West had stalled, and Kitchener was perhaps most needed, he decided instead to return to Egypt to open a new front. A division of the Royal Navy, two Indian Corps, the ANZACs, a token French division, and all British Cavalry not yet engaged in France were fired at Alexandretta like a torpedo and detonated the Turkish position in the Levant.
As the ANZAC infantry and Churchill’s Naval Division secured the city, the Horsemen of the British Army set the Near East on fire, Aleppo falling at the end of June and a revolt exploding in Arabia led by the Hashemites of Mecca. Over the following months, the Turkish Empire was pressed in and taken apart piecemeal from every angle: from Sinai; Jeddah; Aleppo; and Damascus. Though Mesopotamia would prove to draw the matter out, and the defeat at Kut, a bitter pill for the British to swallow, Kitchener would reduce the Turkish Empire to its rump of Asia Minor.
Politically, the campaign had huge ramifications. Its success brought Italy and Greece into the war, and gave the Bulgarians pause to join the Central Powers. Churchill reaped the rewards as the great victory gave him political capital enough to take on Asquith for leadership of the government. Laterally, some have argued the flaw in the strategy, as once Arabia was denied the Turks it sapped the strength of the British with ascendancy of Arab nationalism and tribal conflict. A follow up in 1917, by forcing the Dardanelles was considered and seizing Constantinople was considered, but dismissed and the armies of the Arabia now found themselves in the same position as the Western Front, in trenches along the frontier with Anatolia…
[6] While brief, Britain’s involvement in the Vietnam War was no less bloody or controversial than its American contemporary’s. The high noon of British involvement came less than 18 months after the first of HM’s soldiers landed in Indochina, during the Tet Offensive. As the Viet Cong and NVA launched their attacks that swept across the country, men of the British 29th Brigade and their allies at the ancient city of Hue, found themselves under serious attack from all sides.
Boxed in from all sides, a fighting retreat through every street and house was fought in a ghostly echo of the Siege of Singapore decades earlier. Most extraordinarily, the British people were exposed nightly to the on-going battle due to the status of trapped, but well-equipped BBC film crew at the time of the Siege, whose rolling coverage became the most watched event since the Coronation. Nevertheless, by 5th February, the city was in serious jeopardy, despite the expression of Major-General Walter Walker that the situation was “a bit sticky”. Poor timing for classic British understatement to his American superiors. The consequent relief column by armour from the 18th Hussars was so thickly swarmed by NVA fighters that the tanks resorted to spraying one another down with their own machine guns, even as they withdrew.
Despite this, the Glosters, Ulster Rifles and Durham Light Infantry held on in the southeast part of Hue, and by the 10th they had been reinforced by air with detachments of Gurkhas, Paras and Green Howards stabilising their position. A new relief mission was launched as part of the full-scale counter attacks against the Tet Offensive. US marines were bussed in along the river and made landings along the west to threaten the NVA’s line of supply, while a new column from Khe Sanh moved round the North. British forces inside the city threw themselves forward at point of bayonet, while reorganised 18th Hussars backed up by The Black Watch broke through from the South.
Hue was dubbed relived by Saigon on 17th February 1968, though mopping up operations would go on for months. The soldiers of the 29th Brigade were immortalised in the minds of the British public from the works of Phillip Larkin to lyrics of the Rolling Stones, yet the scenes of carnage on the BBC were a troublesome pill to swallow. Gaitskell’s ‘New Labour’ finally split as Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle and Tony Benn all resigned and his government’s days were numbered, and the Prime Minister was personally overwhelmed by the episode, not least that he finally gave into American pressure for the use of chemical warfare and incendiary bombing. In March, the Government made its plan to withdraw from the conflict clear much to the President’s chagrin, not that he lived to see it. (In)famously, the PM was found dead at his desk on his 62nd Birthday from a sudden heart attack; it is rumoured he clutched in his hand the latest casualty report from Vietnam.
[7] Over two days, the Royal Navy took in piecemeal the best of the Kriegsmarine’s surface raider’s before dealing a bloody nose to the Schlachtflotte, sending to the bottom of the North Sea the products Plan Z and settling the score of the original battle in the First War. The German aim was to put the Hipper-class Panzerschiffes into the Atlantic, hoping to force the Royal Navy to scatter across the shipping lanes looking for them. Großadmiral Raeder signed off on the plan for the ships to depart within hours of each other, with the carrier Graf Zeppelin and a destroyer escort.
The Admiralty caught wind of it as the ships left their moorings and scrambled to respond. Speed was the key for the British, being able to catch the Pocket Battleships before they could scatter – Admiral Holland led the battlecruisers Hood and Renown ahead, where he caught Prinz Eugen west of Jøssingfjord. Holland turned his ships North and opened fire, trapping Prinz Eugen between his guns and Norwegian waters. The next ship, Blücher, turned west hoping to use Eugen as bait only for it to run into Holland’s reinforcements, the cruisers Manchester, Sheffield, and Southampton.
Britain had numbers and experience, but the Germans were fanatical and their reinforcements closer. A sortie of Stukas from Zeppelin struck the battlecruisers, giving Eugen chance to break off, while Hipper and Lützow chased off the cruisers. At this point it looked like the Kriegsmarine might get away, till a squadron of Swordfish who, though failing to score a hit caused confusion enough to disrupt the German ships. Shortly, after Holland reorganised and turned to face off with the main force, who were shocked to see the guns of 2nd and 3rd Battle Squadron baring down on them. With the battlecruisers moving North, and Battle Squadrons moving South, all but Prinz Eugen were caught between the British guns.
At the last, Raeder changed tact after reports from Graf Zeppelin’s scouts revealed the source of the Swordfish to be carriers Ark Royal and Furious. Zeppelin rendezvoused with fast battleships Bismarck and Scharnhorst, hoping to destroy the isolated carriers and salvage German pride from the catastrophe. What followed was history’s first carrier-on-carrier battle, in which the inexperience and operational short-sightedness of the Kriegsmarine told all: flightdecks clogged, lack of ammunition, and aviation fuel. The net result was the all but two Hipper-class destroyed (Eugen interred in Norway, Seydlitz limping home), Graf Zeppelin had to be towed back to by Bismark, while Scharnhorst’s captain chose to scuttle her after damage sustained by aircraft from Ark Royal. Raeder had swung for the fences and failed, to the fury of the Fuhrer, though he kept his position. What little time Hitler had for the Kriegsmarine went to Doenitz’s U-boats.
[8] 1st July 1916 stands alongside Waterloo and Rorke’s Drift as the Greatest days for British soldiering. At a crucial time when the Entente was facing an ascendancy from the Central Powers at Verdun, at Kut, in the East, on the North Sea and stalled in Flanders. While whole of France was fighting at Verdun, pressure mounted on the B.E.F. to offer their support quickly.
The British had been months in the planning their offensive along the Somme River by the men of the fresh 4th Army. Expectations were high of the plan set down by General Hubert Gough and his C.o.S Brigadier Montgomery, and B.E.F C-in-C Horace Smith-Dorrien was cautious to launch an offensive with green troops, and the CIGS Douglas Haig was impatient for one. In a week’s long preliminary bombardment, British artillery shattered the land, as villages of Mametz, Thiepval, Fricourt among others were reduced to matchsticks and rubble. On July 1st, VIII Corps went forward – in some places the German positions ceased to exist, in others there remained strong, fortified redoubts – running into trouble as the Germans counterattacked before there was any chance to consolidate the gain. X Corps had moved its men forward undercover of the final bombardment, as the Ulster and 32nd Division captured all its objectives, the defenders taken still huddled in their dugouts or surrendering as they left them. Further south, XIII and XV Corps made more conservative advances, under a creeping barrage – nevertheless, Fricourt and Mametz fell in good order.
Despite the success of the first day, the British ran out of impetus, as despite the rigidity of the planning, Gough had done much less planning on what was to follow the first day, surprised by its success. From London, Haig telegrammed urging the need for a mass breakthrough and for reserves and Cavalry to go through and exploit the confusion in the German line, while Smith-Dorrien urged caution for consolidation while guns and ammunition was brought forward. Despite a breakup of cohesion, Gough went forward, and the offensive fell into trouble – without the advantages of the first three days of the assault, with the likes of Longueval and Deville Wood became bloody battles that dragged on. Regardless, 4th Army had accomplished its strategic objective and the Germans halted at Verdun. After the humiliations of 1914 and the false promises of John French in 1915, the B.E.F had bitten the German army, and chewed, chomped, and choked on it. They had earned the respect of their enemy at last and realisation that the Germans could be shifted out their position in Flanders proved invaluable in the coming years.
[9] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood in recent years, the British certainly played their part in the Invasion of Europe and avenge the humiliation of Drøbak Sound. Ever since Norway had bounced into the War, large numbers of Axis troops moved into guard its Northern flank and Swedish iron ore shipments, making it formidable target. On 2nd March 1944, British 4th Army fell on the Land of the Midnight Sun from Scotland.
A coup de main operation by airborne troops and commandoes seized the naval defences of Trondheim and Narvik in the early hours, remaining batteries by daylight were bombarded by ships and aircraft of the Allied Fleet and the landing troops were moving a shore to seize the vital ports. Though 250,000 German’s garrisoned Norway, they were spread thin, especially since the Quisling Coup a year earlier made the Norwegian Army suspect to the Nazis, and the concentration of British forces at only two points in the far North, away from the concentration of forces around Oslo, Bergen, and Stavanger. By the 3rd, both landing zones were cleared and British troops moving inland. For VII Corps in Narvik, the march South became unexpectedly treacherous due to the unfortunate positioning of Fallschirmjäger and SS units on exercises in the countryside during the invasion, who had to be methodically cleared in a series of guerrilla actions that lasted the whole campaign. Meanwhile, II Corps cleared a cordon at Støren to receive German counterattacks, to grind them up and attrit German operational abilities.
The force multiplier for the battle became the control of Air and sea by the Allies. By the middle of March, it became apart to Berlin that they could not effectively supply their forces in Norway without the Reichsbahn. Like in Tunisia, Stalingrad, and the Battle of Britain, the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe were incapable of supplying the Wehrmacht in vast numbers. By the end of March, VII Corps’ Road was clear enough and positioned itself at Stugudalen to take advantage of the withering state of German forces. The advances that followed saw Lillehammer and Ålesund captured. Resigned to the fate of his position to the North, Hitler promoted Generaloberst Dietl to Generalfeldmarschall, like Paulus and Rommel before him. Uniquely however, Dietl followed the Fuhrer’s expectations and committed suicide. The net result was German units either surrendered were they stood or were annihilated by British firepower in piecemeal as command devolved to the local level. The final losses of Axis troops were 300 thousand killed and captured. Strategically, Fortitude succeeded as German forces shifted to guard any exploitation of its weaknesses in Denmark and a smoother path for the Ironside landings in Western France.
[10] The Stalingrad of the East.
Singapore could have easily been the sight of a disaster from which the British might never have recovered in the Far East, had it not been for the resilience of the Commonwealth soldiers there – not least their commanding officer, Adrian Carton de Wiart. Fighting mad, de Wiart had been sent out east in early 1941 after his criticism of the Hoare government where he found the garrison, though large, poorly equipped and trained compared to those in Europe. Over the next 11 months, de Wiart saw to remedy the situation and with the help of another eccentric, Brigadier MacAlister Stewart, developing a plan for jungle warfare that was rolled out to all units on the Peninsula. Nevertheless, like the rest of the world, the British were caught off guard by the Japanese in December 1941.
Immediately the British were put at a disadvantage when most of the RAF was shot up while still on the ground. By Christmas, the Royal Navy was out of action too – Force Z was forced to withdraw after HMS Indomitable was damaged and unable to launch her aircraft, and the battleships escorting her were too vulnerable without aircover. All that remained was de Wiart’s 80,000 men to hold back the 5 divisions of Mutaguchi’s 25th Army. The ferocity of Japanese attacks stunned the Commonwealth soldiers, and moving fast by bicycle, manoeuvred around their positions or broke through them with tanks for which the British had no answer. Positions eventually stabilised around Johore at the Battle of Muar at the end of January, all the while Singapore suffered constant air attack, and both sides deployed jungle patrols behind the lines. Mid-February, de Wiart ordered a counterattack by the Australians that failed due to lack of artillery and Mutaguchi followed up by renewing the offensive that forced the British back to Singapore Island itself.
The 2 months that followed mirrored scenes from trenches of the last war, and de Wiart loved it. Fanatical Banzai charges forced the British out of their positions, followed counter barrages and charges by Commonwealth troops at point of bayonet. By April, the Japanese reached Bukit Timah which became the scene of brutal hand-to-hand fighting that was so intense that after a week the Japanese resolved to level it with artillery. At last, the Japanese reached their culmination point, and the Army’s 5 division were proving too much to support, and they were forced to evacuate the island itself and units were withdrawn to other fronts in Burma and the Pacific. Despite the temporary relief, Singapore remained surrounded and isolated and suffering air attack and occasional skirmishes over the Straits. The fate of the city would hang in balance for a further two years, as the consequent campaigns seesawed back and forth across Malaya, but the after the arrival of the British Pacific Fleet and the landing at Malacca in September, the island was declared relived and reinforcements at last came in. George VI awarded the island the George Cross for its resilience, while Carton de Wiart was replaced by Henry Pownall and would spend the rest of the war as British representative in Nationalist China.
