Yorktown 1781 – The World Turned Upside Down

On Thursday 28 June 1781, two officers and their escort of green-coated cavalry rode along a narrow peninsula in eastern Virginia, towards Chesapeake Bay. Their mission was to reconnoitre a small town, which stood on 35-foot-high bluffs at the north-eastern tip of the peninsula, overlooking the York River. The town had a harbour capable of accepting the largest merchant ships; two main roads led from it to Williamsburg and Hampton. 12 and 18 miles distant respectively, and a ferry crossed to Gloucester Point, a mile to the north-east. The surrounding land was gently undulating, with sparse vegetation – a few copses and the occasional plantation building were the only notable features. The soil was light and sandy, difficult to dig and easily eroded by wind and rain. Around the town ran two creeks – one a tidal, marshy cut with steep banks, to the west; the other, wider, to the South-east, with a mill pond at its head.
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Salamanca 1812

On 22 July 1808, HMS Crocodile nudged its way into the port of Corunna in northern Spain, with Lt. Gen. Sir Arthur Wellesley on hoard. Wellesley had sailed to Spain as commander of a 14,000-strong British force with the intention of supporting the people of both Portugal and Spain who had risen up against the invading French armies. Unfortunately, Wellesley was told in no uncertain terms by the local Spanish Junta that his presence, and that of his army, was not welcome, and he was advised to continue his journey along the coast of Portugal and seek help there. Wellesley departed Corunna on 24 July. Four years later – almost to the day – Sir Arthur, by then Lord Wellington, achieved one of his greatest successes on the field of battle when he defeated the French Army of Portugal under Marshal Marmont at the battle ol Salamanca.
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Rorke’s Drift 1879 – Pinned Like Rats in a Hole

The battle of Rorke’s Drift is not only the most famous engagement of the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879, but arguably one of the best known battles in the history of the British Army. The epic struggle against overwhelming odds, the undeniable valour of both sides, have invested it with a thrilling, Boy’s Own Paper quality, which struck a chord with the British public at the time, and has inspired generations of authors and film-makers ever since. Yet in fact this particularly lough and brutal battle was fought to secure no very great strategic objective; it was little more than a mopping-up operation in the aftermath of a far more serious clash, and its true significance was largely a moral one it rescued British prestige on a day when the army of the greatest imperial power in the world had been dramatically and unexpectedly humbled.
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Majuba 1881 – The Hill of Destiny

In 1881 the British Empire embarked on another of the ‘little wars’ that had become commonplace for the Victorian Army in the latter half of the 19th century. However, this time there were to be no glorious battle honours added to the annals of the Army; onlv defeat and humiliation. Depending on your viewpoint at the time, the conflict was known as either the Transvaal Rebellion or the Transvaal War of Independence. Today it is more generally known as the First Anglo-Boer War. Regardless of its name, it was to leave the British Army frustrated and burning with a desire for revenge. The roots of the conflict lay 50 years earlier in the Great Trek, the mass exodus of Dutch-speaking settlers from the Cape Colony. Their purpose was to find a new land for themselves in the interior of Africa, far from the constraints and interference of the British Colonial authorities, where they could continue their traditional pastoral way of life. These people, the Boers, favoured an independent and solitary life, guided by a strict religious code. Their lifestyle had been dramatically affected by the arrival of the British in southern Africa.
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Little Big Horn 1876 – Custer’s Last Stand

General Phillip H. Sheridan was the Division of Missouri Commander, and his immediate superior was General of the Army William T. Sherman. Both had fought under General Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War. In 1876, with Grant as President, the three were collectively dictating policy and intent upon a military solution to the Sioux problem. On 8 February 1876, after waiting for the ultimatum deadline to expire, Sheridan ordered his subordinate department commanders, Generals Terry and Crook, to ‘prepare for operations against the hostiles’. Their mission was to converge on and break up the concentration of hostile Sioux and Cheyenne believed to be in the Big Horn Valley and force them back to the reservations.
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Lake Peipus 1242 – Battle of The Ice

By the late 12th century the eastern Baltic, from Prussia to Finland, was the last major bastion of European paganism. This was seen as an affront by the Church, but the Balts and Finns of the area were not barbarians. Their homeland’s winters were cold, though not as ferocious as those of neighbouring Russia. Nevertheless, it was a region of forests, lakes, marshes and rivers, with little room for agriculture. A borderline between northern coniferous and Southern deciduous forests ran through what is now Estonia, where the silver birch featured most prominently in folklore. In the east a bleak region of swamp and marsh with thousands of tiny streams and several great rivers, all of which froze in winter, separated the Baltic peoples from Russia.
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Fornovo 1495 – France’s Bloody Fighting Retreat

By the late 15th century France was the most powerful state in western Europe. Having defeated England in the Hundred Years War, it was now pushing hard against its eastern neighbours. Furthermore, the French kings had inherited a claim to the kingdom of Naples, the largest state in Italy. This was the essentially medieval and dynastic background to King Charles VIII’s extraordinary invasion of Italy in 1494. But Charles was also a dreamer who saw himself as the crusader who would roll back the ever-spreading tide of Ottoman Turkish conquest — and a military base in southern Italy was a good place to start from. The Italian peninsula was fragmented into several states, though the concept of Italy as a nation did exist. Among these little states Milan was traditionally a friend of France. So was Florence. Venice was preoccupied with the Ottoman threat to its overseas empire, and the Papacy was concerned about the growing power of Naples, as were several other Italian states. Naples itself feared the French claim to its crown and was also on the verge of war with Milan.
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Colenso 1899 – The Boer War in Natal

In 1899 Great Britain was at the height of its Imperial power. The Queen Empress had been on the throne for more than 50 glittering years, and her domain touched upon every continent. Yet, even at this very pinnacle of Imperial pomp and majesty, the British army, the guardian of Empire in countless wars across the globe, was destined to be humiliated by poorly-organised citizen militia consisting of men whom the British professionals despised as back-woods farmers. In one week in December 1899 the farmers of the South African Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal inflicted three serious reverses on British troops. In the hills around Stormberg railway junction, on the dusty plain before the Magersfontein heights, and on the grassy flats before the Thukela heights at Colenso, the highly trained British military machine ground to a halt in the face of the Boers’ practised marksmanship and fieldcraft. The shock waves of this ‘Black Week’ reverberated around the Empire, for the action at Colenso involved not merely a military reverse, but the humiliation of a national hero. Worse, it was the precursor of some of the toughest fighting Britain had experienced since the Crimean War.
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Yarmuk 636 AD – The Muslim Conquest of Syria

The battle of Yarmuk in 636 was a turning point in history. If the Byzantines had won, Graeco-Roman domination of the Middle East could have continued and medieval Europe might have been denied the cultural contacts with eastern Asia that Islamic civilization opened up. Yet the whole process of 7th century Muslim Arab expansion remains little understood outside a small circle of specialists. Few contemporary accounts survive, although there are highly detailed descriptions dating from a generation or so later. It is also difficult to separate fact from pious myth. Today, however, the ‘pendulum of credibility’ has swung back from the almost total disbelief of early 20th century Western historians to what might be described as a ‘twilight of historical reality’.
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Poltava 1709 – Russia Comes of Age

Charles XII of Sweden’s invasion of Russia was the first attempt by a major European power to invade the country The manner in which the campaign was fought, the problems facing the protagonists and its outcome have clear parallele with the invasions of 1812 and 1941. A study of the campaign should therefore provide some degree of insight into the problems facing these later and larger campaigns. It is also of major historic significance, as it brought about the demise of one European power and the rise of another, greater one. At the start of the campaign in late 1706, Sweden was at the height of her imperial glory. Early seventeenth century campaigns had added Finland, Karelia and Ingria to the Swedish domain, territory that ran around the north coast of the Gulf of Finland. The campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus in Poland and Lithuania had secured the Baltic provinces for Sweden, securing the vital commercial city of Riga. By the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, Sweden was the possessor of a number of scattered enclaves along the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, which were of great financial benefit to the Swedish state. During the late seventeenth century the political and military aim of the Swedish crown was to maintain this ‘imperium’. To achieve this, the country built up an army and navy out of proportion to her size, backed by an impressive military administration.
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