The New Model (Chinese) Army

It appears that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is deliberately recruiting college educated soldiers.  Sounds like they’re trying to copy the US model of a highly educated highly effective Army.

Certainly they have been modernizing their forces a lot recently but they’re biggest asset is still sheer numbers.   So this, if correct, represents an interesting change.  Better educated soldiers potentially means smarter/more cunning soldiers that think on their feet better and take initiative.  Later it might get you a better military scientist for new weapons systems.

The copy of the GI bill that is mentioned in this article as well is interesting but I wonder if this will have unintended consequences down the road:  Well trained well educated post-military citizens in droves – who may be die hard patriots but see right through the propaganda they’re being fed.  And the final line of the article, if true, is the even more interesting part:  1.44 million college gradautes interested in military service.

Corunna 1809

This is a Napoleonic era battle, and while the hero of Corunna is the British General John Moore, Napoleon’s hand is indirectly guiding this battle and its outcome.  This battle covers the initial British landing of troops in Spain to liberate the peninsula from the French, but is called “Sir John Moore’s Fighting Retreat” and perhaps should be called “laying the groundwork for Wellington”.

In 1809 the Spanish revolted against French rule and set up their own ruling Junta and called for the few allies in Europe to come to its aid.  Britain saw the advantage here in that it would put pressure on the French border and so mobilized its army for a major overseas operation.  Thanks to Trafalgar in 1805 their island was safe and now they chose to go on the offensive.  What they did not realize as their plans were put in place, troops mobilized, and ships set sail for northern Spain, was that Napoleon was using his gift for logistics and mobilization to restore a large number of armed forces lost in previous campaigns to crush Spain and bring it back under rule.

So as troops were landed and the British marched on Madrid to secure the city, word began to come that Napoleon was marching on Madrid which caused Moore to change tactics.  In fact, he began to march back to where he began from rather than moving forward to fight.  In hindsight this was good and bad.  Good in that even though he did not have good intelligence of the situation in Madrid and the size of the French Army, he was hopelessly outnumbered and therefore was able to save most of his army which he would have lost had he moved forward.  The decision was bad in that morale in the army began to decrease.  Troops very brave and spoiling for a fight now moved into a completely different mode as they had to start marching back where they had come from, and supplies had not kept up with them.  As Moore moved his troops back into northern Spain and to Corunna, troops were lost due to unusually severe winter weather that showed up in the mountain passes and the lack of food & supplies.  To add insult to injury, Napoleon did not pursue directly, but did send French units to follow and try to engage the British.  So while he never participated directly in this battle, he did influence its final location and outcome due to Moore’s response.

On the way back to Corunna there were skirmishes between French and British, with several events going in the British favor but eventually the British reached Corunna and set up some basic fortifications to prepare for evacuation.  The French finally caught up and battle was joined.  While the British won this battle they did so with heavy losses including the death of Moore.  This bought them enough time to finish evacuation back to England for retraining, refit, and to fight another day (very early echoes of Dunkirk here).

So the successful evacuation of 26,000 English troops (but with losses of 6,000) at first it looks like Napoleon won again and held Spain, but if you look at everything in perspective, it’s not quite that simple.  By landing a large force in Spain and forcing the French to chase them to a spot in Spain, hold them off (a tactical victory) and leave to fight another day it showed a gap in the Napoleon invincibility perception armor.  Even though it wasn’t Napoleon at Corunna, Napoleon was THE French army, so a defeat of that army is a defeat of Napoleon as far as British morale was concerned.  Further, it held the French away from Portugal which meant the Penisular campaign wasn’t quite over – there was still an option to take battle to French here through a safe base on the Iberian coast.  Therefore, the loss at Corunna really did set up possibility of future English success in the Penisula, even if at the time many didn’t see it that way – but in the official histories that followed, Wellington and others made it clear that this was the real outcome of the battle.

If you want to learn more – Corunna 1809 by Philip Haythornthwaite (Campaign #83 by Osprey Publishing) is a good read and worth picking up.

Operation Cobra – 1944

One of the things that I have noticed about military history is, in general, the closer you get to the modern era a particular battle or event will cover a whole lot more land.  Take ancient times – battles were fought in just one place.  You could place the exact spot and that major battle would go all day and then it was recorded.  Go up to medieval times and it’s about the same.  After this though a battle may start to move and go over several days.  In Napoleonic times and you’re covering swaths of countryside.  WWI is almost a slide back in that you have miles of front but not much moving at all but the battles cover months.  Then there is WWII.  Miles and miles covered in a day and sometimes the entire battle is fought over a moving battlefield and whole swaths of countries as mechanized units rapidly progress.  Operation Cobra, the breakout from Normandy for the Allies, represents a classic in mobile warfare with exploitation of events, rapid encirclement, and represents the major change in tempo in the final years of WWII – moving ever rapidly into quick and mobile warfare.

If you think a bit more about how much warfare was changed by the aspects of mobile warfare, the mental strength of the generals involved (on both sides) is really quite astounding.  Mechanized warfare had been around for awhile, but to really master it and all the logistics that it requires to pull it off from a combined arms perspective (ground troops, tanks, supply trains and air support) is really impressive because you have to think in depth and in 3 dimensions.  This is where the operation begins – planning for a breakout from Normandy.  The generals in charge of planning are all the big names – Bradley, Patton, Eisenhower, along with some other names not mentioned as often who played key tactical roles in the operation.  Even British general Montgomery played a role, but this is really a US operation so really one must focus there when understanding the breakout.  Certainly the British helped by tying up forces in the North (a huge drive that failed cause the Germans to believe that the primary thrust would be in that sector, not in the American sector) but the exploit and breakout is strictly an American success.

Tactical and technical innovation in reaction to local events were also important to this operation.  Part of the issue slowing down the US forces in the Normandy area was the terrain, which was heavy with “Bocage” which is a thick mat of trees and shrubs that serves as its own fence and wall between farmer plots throughout the Normandy area. This terrain suited the defender perfectly such that troops going past could be easily ambushed by forces on the other side of Bocage.  So tanks were fitted with special blades and bulldozers to uproot the Bocage at its roots allowing penetration through the walls.  The blades were created from anti-amphibious obstacles welded together by the Germans prior to D-Day and were fitted onto Sherman renamed “Rhinos” after some engineers began to think about how to get through the Bocage.  So this was a good innovation.  An example of bad innovation (or at least it didn’t work as well as intended) was the use of camoflauge uniforms.  Giving troops a lot of camouflage uniforms to help them move quickly through Bocage terrain stealthfully turned out to be a very bad idea in that most US troops associated camouflage with Waffen SS units and there were lots of friendly fire incidents with the elite US units given these uniforms.   So the US numerical superiority was important to breaking out, but the other key factor and innovation which assisted the breakout was air power and artillery.  Air power would be the use of low altitude 100lb carpet bomb attacks prior to the start of the assault plus localized fighter bomber attacks on enemy armor columns.  Artillery I’ll come to later.

The plan was to use air power to smash the enemy divisions on the front line and then immediately follow up with an armor offensive, rapidly breaking through the German lines.  The attack would commence around St. Lo and then push out and rapidly accelerate to the French west coast – cutting off bridges in the south as well so that the Germans could not reinforce their lines from other parts of France.  On July 24 the operation got off to an aborted start when weather prevented the bombing run but due to some bad communications, some bombs were dropped anyway both on friend and foe alike.  Enough bombs were dropped such that the Panzer Lehr division, a large tank + infantry division, thought that it had survived a major attack (10 vehicles lost, 350 killed) and moved forward to new dug-in positions expecting to repulse a major attack by US armor.  Instead on 25 July the actual full bombing attack commenced and Panzer Lehr took the brunt of it since it had moved directly into the new bombing zone – 1000 troops killed and about half of  their armor damaged in the attack.  At this point the US began the ground offensive but it didn’t get very far since some of the German units which had moved forward very close to US lines were completely missed by the bombing attack and had to be taken out the old fashioned way.  However this did not occur all along the line and units did begin to pour through the gaps.  By 28 July the Americans had pushed through so much that several German units were about to be encircled, leading to the first major lopsided victory in American favor when the entire 2nd SS Panzer Division, “Das Reich” was wiped out as they tried to escape and fighter bombers just strafed and bombed the main road out of their pocket repeatedly.  This event and others by July 29 led to a complete change in the original plans.  Rather than consolidation of gains the decision was made to move to exploitation and race further down the coast to Brittany.

By July 30 the US forces were rapidly moving along such that the French coastal cities of Brest, Lorient, and St. Naizaire were rapidly encircled and the German garrison forces in siege mode by August 7th.  From breakout to the encirclement of Brest, the movement by the US 6th Armored division was the most extended operation done by any US division in 1944 to 1945 and over such a quick period of time as well.  The fact that they were able to exploit the breakdown in German defenses and hold together a coherent front and operations is testament to the superior organizational skills of the US command.  This however was not the end of the operation.

On August 7 the Germans staged a counterattack led by a the remnants of several armored units that were assembled together.  The night attack by the German units quickly pushed into and took the town of Mortain with no opposition, but this ultimately did no good because the US forces in the area were not at Mortain, but were entrenched on the hill overlooking the town (now behind German lines) which gave them excellent views of the units in town and the roads leading in and out of town.  So while this main thrust moved another 6 miles and encountered the main body of the nearby US forces (not the units on the hill mentioned previously) the other arm of the German counter-attack never launched its attack due to poor inter-force communications.  The US response to these events shows how far the Germans had fallen in the recent days.  US initial reaction was “…the attacks appeared to be uncoordinated units attempting to escape rather than aggressive action.” but later the US realized that the attack was indeed a larger offensive.  However once dawn broke the hills surrounding Mortain now had clear views of the the German forces, and these hills was where localized US divisional artillery had been located and they now began to pour shells down on the visible Germans.  And then the US forces on the hills added insult to injury by calling in air strikes they could act as forward observers for.  294 sorties from Rocket armed British Typhoons and 200 sorties from US P-47s occurred in this area which caused the entire German counter-attack to bog down into a defensive operation.  Now this operation plus the Canadians launching a major offensive in the North tied down the Germans so completely that Patton was free near Le Mans to begin a pincer movement to seal off the Germans completely.  You almost have to feel sorry for the German command here – they were outnumbered, outgunned, and every time they turned around they had another major offensive to deal with.

The final events of the campaign deal with Patton and the Canadians encircling the Germans and the Allied race to the Seine river.  The Allied forces did indeed encircle the Germans except for a gap in the line at Falaise (The famous Falaise Gap).  While some generals pushed for closing the gap, Bradley was concerned that the Canadian thrust and Patton’s thrust would come to a head too fast and lead to some friendly fire incidents, plus it would be difficult to call in air support without allied losses from allied air strikes.  Further he was concerned that his flanks were exposed since these pincers were deep into enemy territory and he had false intelligence that the Germans were withdrawing from Falaise rapidly.  No one could believe that the Germans would lock up their forces in one area and allow them to be surrounded, but they had no knowledge that Hitler’s meddling led to the poor German decisions.  So slowly the Allied pincers closed within 15 miles of each other and on August 15 the Allied landed forces in Southern France (Operation Anvil-Dragoon).  Now with German forces in southern France tied up dealing with this unopposed amphibious landing, the Allies were free really punish the Germans.  Finally with some regret Hitler authorized the withdrawal of units in the south of France and the units trapped near Falaise but now it was too late.  Constant air strikes, fortified positions and rapidly moving armor columns closed up the pocket and while about 20,000 to 40,000 Germans escaped, by August 21st about 50,000 were captured with another 10,000 dead and all local panzer and German military equipment had been smashed beyond recognition.  As described in the book, the Germans were surrendering in droves to stop the incessant artillery fire in the pocket.

So all this was done by August 21st, but on August 18th the Allies were in striking distance of Paris and due to unrest in the city, despite Hitler’s commands to the local garrison to burn the city to the ground, the German garrisons surrendered or left the city by August 25th.  I won’t discuss this aspect of the battle so much because the book does it better, but also because this final event really sums up the entire campaign.  A breakout plan that went so successfully that it broke several German divisions permanently, liberated a huge portion of France, unexpectedly delivered Paris, and gave the momentum to the Allies for the rest of the war.  Quite an operation and truly an amazing event in US military history being an example of good planning and taking advantage of opportunities as they presented themselves.  The combined forces of massed artillery, air strikes, and mobile armor columns greatly helped win the battle – but again you have remember it is the coordination of all that firepower that made the campaign go so well.  And when you consider that this occurred over such a wide theater and a short period of time (3 July to 25 August) this again is truly impressive.

If you wish to learn more, check out Osprey Campaign Series #88 by Steven J. Zaloga.  It’s a good read and has lots of detail and useful information if you wish to learn more beyond what I’ve summarized above.

Lützen and Bautzen 1813

These two Napoleonic era battles in 1813 in Germany/Prussia can be simply summarized as follows:

1)  After Napoleon loses in Russia, he rebuilds his army and the Russians pursue him.  His loss plus the Russians driving the French out of Prussia during their pursuit gives enough reason for Prussia to revolt and join with the Russians to take on France.

2)  Napoleon finishes rebuilding his army which is an impressive organizational feat since he went from practically nothing back up to 100,000+ men.  Napoleon then realizes that the Prussian uprising and Russian alliance with the Prussians may cause the French empire to lose a lot more than just Prussia (whole parts of Germany and the Polish puppet state), and so Napoleon goes after the Prussian/Russian alliance.

3)  Battles ensue at Lutzen and Bautzen, and while in both cases Napoleon wins the field, he takes more losses than he inflicts on the Prussians/Russians and is not able to achieve a significant decisive victory – just push his enemies back.

4)  Due to the ability of the Prussians and Russians to hold their own and slowly wear down the French by attrition even though outnumbered, this convinces the Austrians to eventually join on the side of the Prussians and Russians in that now numerical superiority can defeat the French.

The rest of the book(Osprey Campaign Series #87) is a bit of a dull read – lots and lots of maneuver here and there leading up to the battle, but I felt that most of the book focused too much on the maneuvers to and from the battle and not enough on the battles themselves.  So overall not a very compelling read in my opinion.

Time to Return to WWII Vehicle Specialization

The new military replacement for the Humvee – the MRAP, was optimized and designed for use in flat desert and urban environments, and apparently while protecting the troops, it not optimized for more rugged terrain like that in Afghanistan.  None of this surprises me, and really should not surprise those who study military technology history, which is why I think it may be time to revisit technology and approaches from WWII.

In WWII you had several types of vehicles for particular roles.  Fast armored cars with just machine guns for scout roles in rough terrain, slower armored cars with medium sized guns for infantry support / light anti-tank roles, light tanks for rough terrain, medium/heavy tanks for slugging it out with heavy armor/emplacements/flat fields, mobile artillery, and so on.   If you look at what is available now you still have some things like this, but for the most part it tends to be one-size-fits-all.  This is partly due to the costs of these weapon systems in that it may not always be cost effective to have so many different weapon systems, but I think the military is going to have to reach back to WWII and borrow vehicle designs for particular environments/battle types rather than one size fits all.  Specifically – more armored cars (LAVs, Strykers) with different types of weapon systems for desert / jungle / rocky terrain, and very light tracked vehicles (a significant update to something like the M24 Chaffee or M48 Walker Bulldog) for infantry support and urban warfare in a wide range of terrains.

Of course – all this is easier said than done since we don’t have economies of scale to make these cheaply (we’re not making WWII scales of vehicles – nor do we have enough factories to do so) and, weapon lethality has significantly changed such that the technology and engineering that go into said new vehicles won’t be cheap either.  Basing things off of a central chassis like Future Combat System (FCS) is now dead, but I think some of the older validated designs could be modified and updated for these new roles rather than just letting the DoD prime contractors push out designs to be shoehorned into a new role.  I’d rather have the military build the design, test it in the field (extensively) and then go to industry and say “Make this, and cheaply.” rather than how it’s done now where the Military says what it wants and the contractors push back a vehicle that is designed to earn them profit.  Let the Military build it and put it through its paces and do all the engineering.

So again I’ll suggest that some vehicle specialization is needed, not generalization.  This is why throughout all of military history you have specific tools, weapons, and defenses for specific tasks, terrains, and enemies.  Very rarely do you find something that is optimal for all situations so I think that it is long since past for a revision of ground vehicle technology in the US military today.  Until we get tanks with anti-grav drives or each soldier can be in fully enclosed powered assault armor, you will have to specialize.

The Armada Campaign – 1588

Campaign series #86 from Osprey Publishing.  We always hear about the famous Spanish Armada and how the smaller English fleet held of the Spanish, but it was not superior English gunnery that won the day.  It helped, but it should be noted that multiple times in the historical record the English captains pointed out how much shot and powder they had expended, but admitted that they had very little to show for it.  What won the battle was 8 ships converted into fire ships sent into the anchored Armada one night.  To quote directly from the book:  “One English historian called the purchase of the eight fireships for just over 5,000 pounds ‘the cheapest national investment the country has ever made’.”   While none of the fireships caused any direct damage from collision into the Spanish ships, the Spanish were forced to cut anchor rapidly and spread out.  Once they lost the ability to anchor they could not control where their ships went and could not stay off the coast of the Spanish Netherlands to help the Duke of Parma ferry his army over to invade England.  Therefore, the winds and currents eventually just kept moving the Armada, now getting more spread out, further and further north into the North sea and further away from their planned invasion point.  The Armada had lost very few ships at this point, but it was the attempted return trip around Scotland, west into the Atlantic, and back south around the west coast of Ireland towards Spain that really did the most damage to the fleet.  Storms and winds pushing the Spanish ships into the rocky coast of Ireland did the most damage, with only 65 out of 110 ships making it back to Spain.

The book does a nice job covering all the events of the campaign, what led Phillip II of Spain to want to invade England, who came up with plans on both sides, the composition of the English and Spanish fleets, the tactics of the day, and the technology used by both sides.  On this point, the English really did have superior weapons because their weapons were on 4 wheeled carriages vs. the Spanish 2 wheeled carriages that were lashed in place which meant the English could reload at a rate of 3X compared to the Spanish.  But, their gunnery was not necessarily more accurate as the number of ships actually sunk from English cannon fire was quite low during the actual gun battles in the English Channel.  Overall a very nice book and a quick read about this battle, its outcome, and what it meant for history after this.  Specifically, after the loss of the Armada and failure to invade England, the power of the Spanish went into wane, and they never had the clout and ability to influence European politics or power after this.

Iwo Jima 1945

When in high school I was really serious about being a Marine, so my love of history naturally led me to study some of the most well-known Marine battles and naturally I picked Iwo Jima; even writing a report about it for my AP history class.  Now when I read about it again in this Osprey campaign series book (#81) I’m not finding that I’m seeing this battle in a different light, but this book does help remind me about the context of this battle and it covers some other little known facts about the battle that I did not know.  The invasion of Iwo Jima was part of a broader strategy to get air power within striking distance of Japan, and the events on the island helped lead to some of the decisions to use the Atomic bomb on Japan.  But this battle had strategic and political ramifications even before it was over.  On D+23 (March 14), due to the public alarm over the casualty rate at Iwo, the Marine general in charge of operations on Iwo had his personnel officer read a war department statement that Iwo was secure.  During the statement reading the artillery fire nearby was so intense that you could barely hear him – and fighting would not end until March 26.  Mission accomplished indeed.  The massive casualties here at Iwo, and those later at Okinawa, really did begin to scare the US general staff about what it would take to invade Japan.

Of the two movies about this battle that have been shown recently (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima), Letters from Iwo Jima is probably the one that best shows the strategy and tactics that the Japanese General (Kuribayashi) chose to take which inflicted such heavy losses on the Marines.  One key tactic was not to meet the enemy right at the shores, but let them land and bunch up on the beaches.  Once the USMC was concentrated on the beach, then the Japanese attacked and were able to inflict heavy tolls because their artillery pieces were already ranged and sighted for the beaches.  As more landed and the artillery fired on, it losses backed everything up on the beach preventing the Marines from making much progress.  The Japanese had prepared a masterful defense of the island, and their use of underground tunnels, holding actions, and the lack of suicide charges (except for a few examples where officers violated Kuribayahsi’s orders) led to the major bogging down of the Marines on Iwo.  They eventually lost, but not without inflicting huge casualties on the Marines.

The final interesting bits of information at the end of the book are several appendices.  This includes an interview of Joe Rosenthal and what really happened as the flag was put up on Mt. Suribachi, details on the Marine Corps Memorial in Washington DC, and a full list of all the medal of honor winners at Iwo.  The last appendix has some very impressive medal of honor stories, including PFC Douglas Jacobson, who took out 16 blockhouses with a bazooka by himself (which is normally a two man operation), completing all this in half an hour and thus allowing the rest of his unit to move forward.  So overall a good historical book if you’re looking for something concise and definitive.

Peking 1900

This read was another Osprey Campaign Series history book, this time about the Boxer Rebellion and the siege of Peking.  The book was interesting to me just because I knew so little about these events and how they unfolded.  What is particularly striking about the whole series of events in the book is how lopsided the whole thing was in favor of the European powers.  Heavily outnumbered and in a foreign hostile land, multinational forces either held out for weeks easily, or, small forces were able to make their way in and relieve the siege.  What is particularly interesting about the whole series of events is that while the Boxers (martial art clubs) started the whole thing, they did not end it.  In fact, once events were underway, it was the Europeans taking a series of forts on the river up to Peking that caused the Chinese government (under the Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi) to take over the fight against the colonial powers until the end at which point the Chinese fled from the imperial city once the large relief column of Europeans arrived.

To give you an idea of how lopsided the fighting was you had 543 soldiers guarding the European, Japanese, and American legations in Peking vs. thousands of Boxers at first, followed by relief columns of 2100 and 18000 colonials (Russians, Japanese, Europeans, Americans) later on vs. tens of thousands of imperial Chinese soldiers.  And the Europeans won handily.  They had some delays in reaching Peking, but nothing really significant that you could call a major setback, and certainly no large casualties.  Historically speaking, the events are an interesting read – but I’m not sure there is much here in the way of history to learn from in regards to tactics or strategy.  Probably more in how to and how not to conduct diplomacy so that you don’t piss off the natives, but not much in way of useful military history in my mind.  Lots of interesting anecdotal stories to tell in the book, including how two Marines put an old muzzle loading cannon (probably 18th century) to use in holding off the Boxers in Peking for several weeks.

Edgehill 1642

One forgets (at least I do) that while the colonies in America were getting set up, England was in the throes of a civil war.  The book I read about the first major battle of that war, fought at Edgehill, is a bit dry but gives a few important lessons:

1)  If you’re fighting combined arms, for the love of god do not let one part/arm of your army go off on its own, no matter how well it’s doing.

2)  One bad commander can ruin everything, even if you have good terrain and the benefit of inertia on your side.

The Royalists and Parliamentarians met at Edgehill and really the Royalists had the edge.  They had higher terrain and very good cavalry, but they blew it due to one super-successful charge and the inability of the main commander (in this case Charles I) to hold all the cavalry in reserve; especially damning since the cavalry in reserve was his own lifegaurd.  At the beginning of the battle, the Royalists had the high ground, and, started off with good momentum pushing the Parliamentarian skirmishers back very quickly, thus removing the hedge cover they had on their wings.  Then, Prince Rupert led the Royalists into a very good charge at the opening part of the battle causing one whole wing of the Parliamentarian army to rout, but instead of turning around and hitting the rest of the enemy army from behind (and letting the rest of the Royalist Foot hit them in the front), they pursued.  One could argue that they were probably supposed to do so that all those fleeing infantry and pikemen could not fight another day, but they ended up following them so far such that they removed themselves from any ability to further participate in the battle.  The end effect was that the Royalists now had no cavalry remaining, but the Parliamentarians on their other wing, obscured by a hill, had an entire group of well armored horsemen, and this unit proceeded to take the Royalist cannon, and then swing around and hit the Royalist infantry now moving down the hill.  What looked bad for the Parliamentarians now allowed them to take the field, with the Royalists fleeing (including Charles I).  By the time the Royalist Cavalry came back, it was the end of the day and the Parliamentarians held the field.  The disarray of the Royalist forces meant they had to regroup, allowing the Parliamentarians to continue their hold on London and other armories, thus dragging out the civil war even longer.

That about sums up the book, but, if you’re interested in seeing all the leading ideas on tactics of the day (Swedish vs. Dutch formations of pike, musket, and cavalry), there is lots more to the book – but I found it overly detailed and not as worthwhile reading.  While the tactics of the day were important, the inability to hold a combined arms army together was what cost the battle, not the choice of tactical formation by one side or another.   The king, THE general in command, could not get his officers to work together and so because he did nothing to hold his units together and get them to work together (something even Prince Rupert knew was important) ensured that he would lose the battle.

Louisbourg 1758: Wolfe’s First Siege

In this Osprey Campaign Series book (#79), the title about the siege of Louisbourg in 1758 focuses on the famous British general James Wolfe, and while Wolfe played a key role in ensuring success in the battle, it was really the supreme commander of the British forces at the siege, Jeffrey Amherst, who ensured that the fortress fell.  For those of you not familiar with this battle, is was one of the crucial ones that led up to the fall of Quebec (and the loss of Canada from the French to the British) as this site in Nova Scotia allowed the French to control the entrances to all of the great lakes, and, dominate north Atlantic shipping due to the base here.

The battle fought in 1758 was not the first.  In 1745 New England volunteers took the place all on their own from the French and it was not handed back to France until 1748 when England wanted Madras in India back (they lost it to the French) and in exchange, France got its naval base back.  Not to suffer like they did the last time, the French greatly reinforced the place, taking advantage of the local harbor and placing additional fortifications such that the guns in the fort could screen the entire harbor – keeping the French fleet safe, as well as serving as a site for the fleets to sortie out and attack the British as needed.  After a disastrous North American campaign in 1757, the British decided to make a much more concentrated effort on just one goal in Canada rather than several, and chose Louisbourg as their target.

With British forces assembled they sailed off to Louisbourg and since they greatly outnumbered the French fleet, forced the French fleet back into the harbor and then tried to land boats nearby.  This failed for six days until Wolfe personally led his boats (literally boats, no fancy amphibious vehicles), despite very rough seas and cannon fire/musket fire from French forces on the beach, onto a rough outcropping further down the coast.  Wolfe jumped out of the boat and led his lead elements directly onto land, even as more boats were overturning and he was being shot at.  Quickly the other British divisions rushed to his location and by sheer numbers quickly established a beachhead at this site.  It’s interesting to note that the French withdrew in good order rather than try to run Wolfe’s troops back into the sea, but to be fair, they were greatly outnumbered as most of their brethren were back in Louisbourg.  So with this landing Wolfe ensured that the British could land more troops, supplies, and cannon to make the siege a success.

After this the history is pretty straight forward.  Now with all of the troops landed, Amherst directed all of the troops overland to just South of Louisbourg and later to the west around its natural cove to start setting up breastworks and cannon batteries to begin shelling the fortress and the French ships.  Systematically the British built up their fortifications and batteries starting from the south and slowly encircled the town and cove, thus ensuring that the French Navy had nowhere to go (they couldn’t sortie out or they would encounter the British Navy, which outnumbered them).   In the end they had the entire cove surrounded, and all of this done while a few Acadian and French partisans harassed the British in the rear, but again due to overwhelming forces, these actions did not get far.  One time the French tried a counterattack as a major battery was being built in a crucial spot near the town, but this counterattack went badly with the French only winning surprise, but doing very little effective damage as the British rushed their overwhelming reinforcements to the position.  So after the entire town was surrounded and shelled extensively, the French finally surrendered after suffering near daily bombardment from 19 June to 26 July.

While the French were greatly outnumbered, Amherst quickly and strategically set up his fortifications in all the right spots to continually put pressure on the French so that they could never really focus all of their efforts in one place.  What is rather surprising from all of this is despite the constant fighting, losses were rather light (102 killed, 303 wounded out of 7000 french soldiers, sailors and marines – 172 killed, 355 wounded out of 16,300 British soldiers and marines) which just goes to show you how much artillery technology has changed.  Amherst, who had been a complete gentleman up to this point (sending rare pineapples to the French Governor’s wife to apologize for the convenience) demanded unconditional surrender from the French in that they become prisoners of war – not the usual honors of war granted when another had fought valiantly.  Colors were taken, weapons confiscated, and the surrendered troops were packed up and shipped off, along with all of the local citizens.  The British only stayed awhile longer in Louisbourg and eventually demolished the fortress in 1760, only leaving provincial garrisons from Boston in the area until 1768, at which point the entire place was abandoned since it no longer served a purpose – the British controlled Canada and the north Atlantic.

So overall a typical 18th century siege, but without the succesful landing by Wolfe it would not have happened, but, Amherst put his numerical superiority to good use and made sure that he was able to systematically wear down the French.