Cassell, 1959, 214 p including 2 p Preface, 1 p Bibliography, 8 p Index.

The book’s title is 1914 and it is a history of the events of that fateful year but of course it is its latter half which will inevitably predominate any such undertaking. The year’s early months are all but ignored, Chapter 1 beginning with “That year the summer came ungrudgingly early.” Nevertheless, Cameron sets the scene of that last hurrah of Edwardian life. (Okay, the old King had died four years before but nothing much had changed in the interim.) He runs through life in Britain in the realms of painting, music, theatre (and music-hall,) dance, literature, fashion, and the nascent cinema with some detail. (At the White City, the Anglo-American Exposition proclaimed the “Wonders of the Panama Canal – the Grand Canyon – America’s skyscrapers.”)

In British politics, though the calls for votes for women were becoming ever louder, the Irish question was to the fore: this was the year of the mutiny at the Curragh. Other more normal political divisions were evident. In one of the broadsheets a Mr John Littlejohns from Pontypridd alliteratively thundered, “Mr W Churchill is the biggest braggart of blatant braggadocio in the brutish trituration of bombastic Radicalism!” continuing his diatribe with, “Mr Lloyd George addresses public meetings with the grimace of a mountebank and the spite of a viper. The present Government is a mawkish medley of parasitical lugubriousness, a neurotic contemporary amalgam of mental profligacy, which seeks to disintegrate the empire with persuasive pasquinades, Liberal levity, volatile vivacity, and designed deception.”

No one thought of war. When the crisis came there was no immediate consensus for war; the Manchester Guardian was for neutrality. Yet Europe, and Britain, slid into it just the same.

Despite the warnings from the last century, the US Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 (whose treaty arguably pointed directly to this later conflict,) the cost in lives still came to many as a shock. France lost 800,000 men in the five months of fighting in 1914; most in the Battle of the Frontiers. Cameron says, “It was not to recover from this for many a generation.” (It certainly hadn’t by 1940.)

British troops took things stoically for the most part. Unlike the Germans, known to sing ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ or the French with their ‘Marseillaise’ or ‘Brabançonne’ they did not march to tunes of patriotism, honour, or glory but instead to songs irreverent and frequently obscene: above all to “an inconsequential ditty called ‘Tipperary’, a mild, music-hall number the uproarious, passionate, almost immortal success of which was a mystery never in history to be explained, or indeed repeated.” Its triumph astonished its jobbing vaudeville composer Jack Judge “to his dying day.”

Yet when they had to the Tommies fought fiercely. On August 27 a battalion of Munster Fusiliers, acting as a sort of rearguard during the retreat from Mons, “became detached from the main body of the 1st Guards Brigade. They fought for almost twelve continuous hours against huge odds, and died, as far as was ever learned, to a man.” Cameron says, “Mons itself could have been, almost was a disaster.”

At home rumours abounded – myths of Cossacks with snow-caked boots landing all over Britain to defend the West. This was around the same time as the Russian armies were being surrounded at Tannenberg, where almost every man was captured or killed, including General Samsonoff. (In Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 Samsonoff is portrayed as committing suicide.) News of this defeat did not pass the Allied censor. Spy fever ensured that “every pull-up and tea-room … fell over themselves to dismiss anyone remotely suspected of alien blood; not a hard thing to detect in the catering trade.”

Though the Germans undoubtedly committed what would now be called war crimes, the soldiers of the BEF was not deceived by the word pictures in the British or even more furious French press. They knew their enemy: “Jerry was a coarse bastard, but if he was the undisciplined sot he was said to be, would he make such a superbly professional job of his sandbag barricades and his trenchings, would he stand in his defensive positions so resolutely and long?”

The steel helmet when it eventually came was apparently “accepted reluctantly, even derisively; it was finally sanctified by a black-and-white artist called Bruce Bairnsfather, who had invented a strange philosophical, whiskered archetype for the middle-aged Tommy whom he called ‘Old Bill’.”

Towards the end of the year income tax was raised for earned income from 9d in the pound to one shilling and for unearned income from 1/3d to 1/6d. Beer went up a penny a pint (a staggering 25% increase,) tea duty from 5d to 8d a pound. All the new taxes would bring in only £65 million. The war was costing £8 million a week. France, Russia, Belgium and Serbia all requested loans from the pre-eminent financial power, Britain.

It was a strange war. Days after the naval defeat at Coronel had been avenged by the sinking of the Scharnhorst, the Gneisenau, the Nurnberg and the Liepzig in the Battle of the Falkland Islands, HMS Bulwark, a pre-dreadnought battleship, inexplicably exploded in Sheerness harbour, with only twelve survivors of its nearly 800 crew. As Beatty was to say at Jutland two years later, there was “something wrong with our bloody ships.”)

This book is an intensely readable overview of those months of peace and war. Though its focus is understandably for the most part on Britain it covers the salient points of the war’s spread into the wider world. It is all the more readable for not concentrating on events in diplomacy or on the battlefields.

Sensitivity notes: Lenin is referred to as having ‘Jewish’ eyes and there is a reference to the thudding music of the negroes.

Pedant’s corner:- The words ‘England’ or ‘English’ is frequently employed to mean ‘Britain’ or ‘British’, England is at one point described as an island. Otherwise; “the land-locked harbour of Port Stanley” (I had no idea of the precise geography here but wondered: how can a harbour be land-locked? I have since looked it up. There is indeed a channel to the sea.)

Hamish Hamilton, 1956, 382 p, including ii p Bibliography and x p Index.

This book has been languishing on my tbr pile for decades. Quite why I left it so long I’m not sure but I’m glad now I picked it up. The author was clearly well versed in his subject. It is lucidly written and mercifully free of the alphanumeric soup of formation designations which tends to bedevil works of military history. This one focuses more on the personalities central to the story of Turkey’s involvement in the Great War – the Young Turks, Mustafa Kemal, Lord Kitchener, Winston Churchill, and the various commanders – as well as the details of the many military engagements which marked the Dardanelles enterprise.

The idea out of which the landings on Gallipoli arose came from Lt-Col Hankey, Secretary of the War Council, as an attempt to evade the impasse on the Western Front, where the Allies were neither advancing nor killing more Germans than British soldiers were being killed, by a flanking move through Turkey and the Balkans. Moorehead outlines the political manœvrings between Kitchener and Churchill (First Lord of the Admiralty) on the for side and Lord Fisher (First Sea Lord) with various others against. The issue would lead in the end to the break-up of Churchill and Fisher’s hitherto close friendship.

The aim of the operations was first, using obsolete battleships (whose loss could be borne) to force a passage of The Narrows, a pinch point between the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara, and then, on to Constantinople in the hope of prising Turkey out of the war. The initial solely naval effort to do so having foundered on an undetected minefield, plans were made for an amphibious landing (actually two) to take the Gallipoli peninsula and protect the flank of a further naval expedition though the Narrows. This amphibious landing was the biggest in history up to that point. It was planned in three weeks. (Compare Operation Overlord in 1944, which took nearly two years to prepare.)

Turkey had recently suffered a series of military humiliations in the Balkan wars of the early Twentieth Century, leading to the Young Turks seizing control of the government. Their hold was precarious though, and another defeat might have brought their downfall. The withdrawal of the Royal Navy, seen as all-powerful, and its French counterpart after their initial setbacks led to an upsurge in Turkish confidence and, Moorehead goes on to say, acted as a trigger for Turkish resentment to find for itself a target in its minority (and Christian) Armenian population upon whom the government thereupon instituted a policy of genocide – murder, rape (Moorehead uses the words “molest women” the first time he deals with this but the more accurate term later) and forced migration amounting to a death march. The strong implication is that without the Allied ships’ withdrawal the persecution of the Armenians would not have occurred.

The Great War in general was a catalogue of lost opportunities or doomed attempts to follow up early success. Moorehead says that over Gallipoli in particular hung a peculiar lethargy, a miasma of indecision. The one exception to this was Mustafa Kemal, who would come to be known later as Kemal Ataturk and who twice, in the hills above Anzac during the first landings and again near Suvla Bay for the later one, managed to be by happenstance in the correct spot to appreciate the danger for the Turks inherent in the situation and to forestall Allied progress. (Some idea of his desperation and borderline fanaticism is that one of his orders at Anzac read, in part, “I don’t order you to attack. I order you to die.”) None of this excuses the failure of General Stopford, commander at Suvla, (with his insistence, the weariness of his men notwithstanding, that no advance could take place without artillery support) to understand there were no Turkish entrenchments there which required such an insurance, nor of overall Commander Ian Hamilton to impress upon Stopford the necessity of quick movement into the hills when briefing him in the first place.

Moorehead is good on the conditions endured by the troops – not least the depredations ensured by the infestations of flies as summer approached, landing on food as soon as it was uncovered so that no mouthful was without its insect accompaniment – and their diverions when no fighting was taking place. With dead bodies and excrement also prevalent it is no surprise that dysentery was soon rampant among the soldiers – even the headquarters staff. British soldiers’ rations were almost entirely of bully beef, whose fat melted in the can, supplemented by plum and apple jam, with no vegetables to vary the diet. By contrast any army officer invited aboard one of the ships – away from the flies, the lice and the smell of death and decay – marvelled at clean linen, glasses, plates, meat, fruit and wine. (Of course, on land there was a decent prospect of surviving a battle; but if a ship went down you most likely drowned.)

As a precursor to Turkey’s entry into the war, and without their say so, the Germans had mined the Dardanelles (obstruction of which was an act of war) so blocking the vast majority of Russia’s exports. Russia’s grain and other exports piled up in the Golden Horn before their ships had to sail back to Russia. When the time was ripe once more to reopen trade the Revolution in that country had removed (the now Soviet) interest in the trade. According to Moorehead (at time of writing in 1956) that pre-war trade through the Dardanelles had never revived in the forty years since.

One of the aspects of the Gallipoli battles I had not realised before was the extent of submarine operations. Several British submarines penetrated into the Sea of Marmara and devastated Turkish shipping there. One submariner even swam ashore to blow up an important railway line. German submarines – easily able to access the Mediterranean through the Straits of Gibraltar as no technology then existed to detect or prevent them – managed to torpedo some Allied warships.

The campaign saw military innovation on a large scale: as well as the experimental use of submarines and aircraft, radio, aerial bombs, land mines and other new devices, it trialled the firing of modern naval guns against shore artillery and the landing of soldiers by small boats on an enemy coast. But the story is mainly of opportunities missed and chances spurned.

Nevertheless it may have continued for much longer (and Moorehead suggests even succeeded in its aims) had not the Australian journalist Keith Murdoch arrived and witnessed the danger and squalor in the dugouts, the sickness, the monotonous food, the general depression. Despite being only a few hours at the front, in collaboration with the only British journalist Kitchener had allowed on the expedition, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, he planned to bypass the usual channels and break the agreement not to send reports without submitting them first to the censor at headquarters. His private letter to the Australian Prime Minister reached the eyes of Lloyd George (by now UK Prime Minister) who himself bypassed official channels by circulating it directly to the Dardanelles Committee without first asking Hamilton for his comments. The man sent out to take over from Hmailton and assess the situation for himself, Lt-Gen Charles Monro, already firmly believed that the war could only be won on the Western Front by killing Germans, Turks did not count.

Thus was set in train the process, sanctioned in the end by a visit from Kitchener himself, which led to the withdrawal of troops, at first only from Anzac and Suvla. That this was accomplished without the Turks getting wind of it – at Anzac the opposing lines were in places no more than ten yards apart – and with no loss, with the help of the famous improvised device of the self-firing rifle using dripping water from a can to fill another attached to the trigger or fuses and candles to burn through string and release a weight, in retrospect still seems astonishing.

That left only the beachhead at Cape Helles, upon which the German commander of the Turks, Liman von Sanders, unleashed a delayed attack accompanied by the heaviest artillery bombardment of the campaign on the now depleted British force the day before the final 17,000 troops were to be taken off. The British fire in response, perhaps inspired by desperation, was so devastating that the follow-up Turkish infantry refused to charge – something rarely seen before on the peninsula. This repulse convinced von Sanders that there would be no further British evacuation, but of course there was. Yet again the withdrawal was completed in the utmost secrecy and highly successful. Despite widescale destruction of supplies as the withdrawal took place the booty of food, weapons and ammunition retrieved from Cape Helles by the Turks took two years to clear up.

The hopes of those who advocated withdrawal never came to fruition, none of the troops from Gallipoli (save the Anzacs) were ever sent to the Western Front. Many more than had landed on Gallipoli were posted instead to the Salonika front or drawn into the long desert campaign against Turkey in Sinai and Palestine. Towards the end of 1918 plans were even well advanced to try again to force the Narrows by ship but were pre-empted by the Armistice.

While never neglecting the other side of the argument Moorehead’s position on the Gallipoli campaign is clear throughout the book; that its objective was worthwhile, and achievable, that its success would have shortened the war, given succour to Russia and even prevented the Revolution there and so given history a different direction.

A cruel comment on the whole business is that no special medal was awarded to those who took part.

Pedant’s corner:- “England” or “English” are used extremely often as the descriptive term for the UK or British respectively, which last also of course encompassed Empire/Dominion troops. Otherwise; Novorossik (Novorossiysk,) De Robeck (at the start of a sentence x 2. The man’s surname was de Robeck, the capital ‘D’ is therefore erroneous,) Keyes’ (several times; Keyes’s,) “on the tide” (this was in the Mediterranean. I always understood that the Mediterranean had very little in the way of tides,) “for all the control exercised on then” (on them,) Liman von Sanders’ (von Sanders’s,) thtat (that,) d’Oyly-Hughes’ (d’Oyley-Hughes’s,) commandos (these didn’t exist in units called such until World War 2,) Xerxes’ (Xerxes’s.) “At the the front” (only one ‘the’,) “rising to a crescendo” (a perennial favourite, this; the crescendo is the rise, not its culmination.)

Another entry for Judith, Reader in the Wilderness‘s meme.

This bookcase is in our living room. Top shelf is Military History with my extensive collection of Pan’s “British Battles” series and more. The second shelf contains more Military History, books by Primo Levi plus some novels, the third is a miscellany, some omnibus editions, hard back Hilary Mantel books plus at the extreme right books on International Exhibitions:-

The books below are in a display cabinet. These are mostly about World Wars 1 and 2 but also there is Thomas Pakenham’s The Boer War:-

Same display cabinet. Churchill’s History of the English Speaking Peoples, Conan Doyle’s The British Campaign in Flanders and Son of the Morning Star.

During World War 2 Italian prisoners of war were held on Orkney. After the sinking of the Royal Oak, Churchill ordered the gaps between four of the islands at the southern end to be filled in. These links between the islands came to be known as the Churchill Barriers. One of the photos in the link shows – still there over 70 years later – the remains of a pre-barrier block ship that was sunk early in the war before the barriers’ construction.

The Italians were set to work on building them. At first they objected as the barriers were military measures on which they were banned from working by the Geneva Conventions. When it was suggested to them that they were being built to improve civilian communications between the islands they happily acceded.

Another part the prisoners’ legacy is the ornately decorated chapel that they built (see pictures here) on the island of Lamb’s Holm, plus the statue of Saint George nearby.

The Italian Chapel is now a tourist attraction in its own right. It was quite busy when we visited so I only photographed the outside.

Italian Chapel:-

Statue of Saint George:-

Syncopy Inc. Directed by Christopher Nolan.

Since our move to Son of the Rock Acres we’re now close to a “proper” cinema, the Kino. It’s not a separate building though but part of Glenrothes town centre, though accesssed from outside. We still don’t go often but the good lady took a fancy to the new film about Dunkirk so off we toddled.

The film dispenses with any preamble or scene setting about the situation leading up to the retreat to Dunkirk and starts with a group of British soldiers moving through the streets of Dunkirk with paper leaflets falling down around them. One looks at a leaflet to see the phrase “We Surround You” and arrows pushing in towards the English Channel – presumably a facsimile of a real German propaganda leaf drop at the time and probably where Dad’s Army took the idea for its opening credits from. Suddenly the men are fired on and they start running – and dropping like flies. Eventually one reaches the beach and the hordes of men waiting there.

We then move to the situation at the Mole (Dunkirk harbour’s long pier) which features Kenneth Branagh as Commander Bolton, in charge of naval affairs there.

The action then switches to the “small boats” being requisitioned by the navy with particular emphasis on one boat. (Mark Rylance puts in a fine performance as the boat’s master but all of the acting was convincing.)

Then we are transported to an RAF patrol of three Spitfires flying to the Dunkirk area with the leader warning his team to keep an eye on fuel levels.

The film intercuts between these four scenarios at (ir)regular intervals and repeatedly shows the same incident but from the several differing viewpoints.

Most of it, though, displays a distinct lack of heroism, men fetching for themselves, queue-jumping, arguing, though others (Royal Engineers contstructing makeshift jetties out of whatever is lying about on the beaches for example) are trying their best to muddle through.

But that is how it would have been. For a soldier Dunkirk must have been anything but heroic. A frantic mixture of hope and fear and endurance with even rescue from the beaches no guarantee of a safe journey home what with the gauntlet of bombers and U-boats still to run.

If anything it is the efforts of the RAF pilots that the film emphasises – despite the complaint after a Stuka attack on the beach of “Where’s the ruddy Air Force?”

I could have done without the swelling strings (a very slowed down tempo for Elgar’s Nimrod) when the small boats started to make their appearance off the beaches, though.

It also seemed odd to me that Rylance’s small boat took its cargo back to Dorset – that’s a long way from Dunkirk and far from the nearest point in Britain. And I had the impression from my reading that the small boats were mainly used to ferry men from the beach to destroyers etc lying off-shore.

The film touches on the point of the soldiers feeling that they had let the country down and dreading the reception they would get on arrival only to find they were being greeted with cheers. It is still strange that the “Dunkirk spirit” is invoked by those who wish to big Britain up. As Churchill said at the time, “Wars are not won by evacuations.”

The second last image – of a burning Spitfire on the beach – seemed emblematic of a Britain that has lost its way and won’t easily find it again. At least in 1940 it only took four years for Britain to get back into Europe.

I saw in the credits at the end the name of one Harry Styles. I knew of the name of course but could not have put a face to it.

Gollancz, 2008, 321 p.

Unlike the previous volumes in Baxter’s “Time’s Tapestry” series which were spread over several centuries and as a result had a disjointed feel, the action in this one is spread over only a few years in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The tale is tighter and more cohesive as a consequence.

The prologue features an Irishman called O’Malley who at MIT has invented a machine he calls a “loom” with which – with the contribution of the dreams of an Austrian Jew called Ben Kamen – he has managed to send a message back to pre-Roman Britain. It isn’t long before both the loom and Kamen have been snatched by the Nazis and incorporated into their greater plan of altering history to ensure the triumph of the Reich.

The meat of the book is set in and after the invasion of Southern England by German forces once the BEF had been destroyed on the shore at Dunkirk. A hasty (and to my mind unlikely) deal by Churchill with the US sees them given military bases – US sovereign territory – south of London. As Hitler is seeking to avoid war with the US the German advance halts when they encounter these. This struck me as more of a sop to possible US readers of the book than something that would have occurred in such a scenario. The presence of a female US newspaper correspondent and her son in the cast of characters also points in this direction. A demarcation line cutting off South-East England is where the war situation settles down.

Off-stage Churchill falls as Prime Minister, to be succeeded by Lord Halifax who nevertheless continues the war – which goes on more or less as in our timeline; Barbarossa, Pearl Harbor, Stalingrad, El Alamein all get a mention, Japan’s invasion of Australia is new though. Again it may be more likely that Halifax would have sued for peace, but perhaps that would have been unthinkable with a substantial part of the UK – not just the Channel Islands – under German rule.

While Weaver can be read as a one-off with no detriment to the reading experience there are several nice touches where Baxter has his characters travel to locations which appeared in earlier books in the series; places like Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall and Richborough in Kent (Roman Rutupiae.)

This is the sort of thing that Harry Turtledove essays so frequently. Baxter’s characters are more rounded than Turtledove’s generally are and the extra twist of the loom makes for an added commentary on the contingency of historical events.