Who's Who in Military History

From 1453 to the Present Day

John Keegan, Andrew Wheatcroft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136414169
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

The Routledge Who's Who in Military History looks at those men and women who have shaped the course of war. It concentrates on all those periods about which the reader is likely to want information - the eighteenth-century wars in Europe, the American Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars and the major conflicts of the nineteenth-century. There is full coverage of the First and Second World Wars, and the many post-war struggles up to and including the Gulf War. It provides: * detailed biographies of the most interesting and important figures in military history from about 1450 to the present day * a series of maps showing the main theatres of war * a glossary of common words and phrases * an accessible and user-friendly A-Z layout The Routledge Who's Who in Military History will be a unique and invaluable source of information for the student and general reader alike.

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Abbas (1571–1629) Persian shah and conqueror. To Shah Abbas belongs the distinction of creating a united Persian army, modelled on those of both the Ottoman Turks and the west, and of extending Persia’s boundaries almost to the limits it had occupied in antiquity. For these achievements, and for the dramatic flowering of Persian culture which took place under his encouragement, he is known as Abbas the Great. Under Shah Ismail I, Persia had suffered both internal fragmentation and pressure from external enemies – Turks, the nomadic Uzbek tribes, and the Mogul rulers of India. Abbas decided to demolish his enemies piecemeal. Coming to the throne at the age of seventeen, he at once made peace with the Ottomans under Selim II, intending to concentrate on the protection of his northern frontier. But although he frustrated any major Uzbek incursion, he allowed them to erode the frontier in the ceaseless to-and-fro of border raiding, confident that he could recover all that he had lost in a major campaign.

His great imperative was to create an army both loyal to him and capable of prolonged campaigning. Traditionally, the Persians relied on tribal levies, and the army was composed almost entirely of cavalry, usually ill-disciplined and loyal only to their tribal chieftains. It was this pattern of Persian army which the Turkish Janissaries had shattered at Chaldiran (1515). Abbas’s first task was to build up a sound basis of taxation to pay for his reforms. Thereafter, he constructed an army with a professional infantry and a ‘tribe’ of skilled cavalry: many of his reforms used the experience of the Turks, but for his artillery he had a team of expert English advisers, led by Sir Robert Shirley: their advice was also instrumental in the creation of a skilled force of musketeers. By 1600 he had the nucleus of a professional army, dependent solely on him for its support and able to undertake sustained campaigning far from home. Abbas soon threw back the Turks, extending his frontiers on the northern border into Uzbek and Turcoman territory. In 1606 he repulsed a major Turkish assault, under Sultan Ahmed II, at Sis, where his skilled and disciplined nucleus routed the Turks, who left 20,000 dead on the battlefield. Thereafter, although peace was made, war with Turkey was endemic throughout his reign. Turkish and Persian interests coincided too closely for any lasting peace to be possible.

From 1616 to 1618 and from 1623 to 1638 Persia was at war with Turkey: the armies were now well matched, but the vast distances involved made it difficult for either side to gain a decisive advantage. In 1623 they clashed over Baghdad, with the Turks advancing and besieging the city, Abbas cutting them off, and their army making a forced retreat. After his death the Turks were able to regain some lost ground, but the army which he founded provided his successors with a secure means of defence. To the north, he took Kandahar from the Moguls, although it was lost to the Uzbeks in 1630. His great achievement, however, was not on the battlefield, but in providing the sound administrative base that made possible the creation of a ‘modern’ army in a traditional system.

Abd el-Kader (1807–83) Algerian emir, general and resistance leader. In 1832, two years after the French capture of Algiers, and to prevent the extension of their conquests into the interior, Abd el-Kader raised the tribes around his capital, Mascara, in western Algeria (Oranie) and proclaimed a Moslem Holy War (jihad). This war was to last with interruptions for fifteen years and falls into three main episodes. In the first he was defeated at Oran (1832), but through the subsequent treaty which he signed with the French he was able to establish his ascendancy over numbers of western tribes. Thus reinforced he resumed his war against the French, defeating Trézel on the Macta, losing Mascara to Clauzel and again accepting French terms from Bugeaud (q.v.) at the Tafna in 1837. This treaty made Abd el-Kader effectively king of unconquered Algeria and in 1839 he raised the standard of revolt once more. The French were forced to garrison the countryside in strength and to organize large mobile columns to track down his bands. Most of the tribes quickly submitted, but he maintained a guerrilla campaign for another eight years, assisted by the sultan of Morocco, Abd er-Rahman. The sultan’s invasion was defeated on the Isly in 1844 and Abd el-Kader, whose household had been captured in 1843, ultimately capitulated to Lamoricière (q.v.) in December 1847. He was interned in France until 1853 but was subsequently reconciled to his conquerors. His name, however, remained to Algerians a catchword of resistance to France throughout the colonial era.

Abd el-Krim, Mahommed ibn (1882–1963) Moroccan chieftain and partisan leader, best known for his masterly conduct of the Rif war (1921–6) against the French and Spanish. His long-held ambition was to lead Morocco to sovereign independence (it had become a French protectorate in 1912 – see Lyautey). During the First World War he was imprisoned by the French for communicating with the Germans. But, escaping, he raised the tribes around Ajdir, preached the Holy War and with German help armed 10,000 men. On 21 July 1921 he inflicted a major defeat on the Spanish in their enclave at Anual (12,000 dead), indirectly bringing down the government and ushering in Primo de Rivera (q.v.) as dictator. By 1924 Abd el-Krim had reduced the Spanish holding in Morocco to a coastal strip and in April 1925 he unleashed a successful offensive against the French border outposts. French and Spanish now combined their efforts, reinforced their garrisons and launched a joint counter-offensive against Targuist, his headquarters. He surrendered there to a French column on 26 May 1926 and was deported to the island of Reunion. Released for reasons of health in 1947, he made his way to Egypt where he resumed his anti-French campaign as a propagandist.

Abercromby, (Sir) Ralph (1734–1801) British general. The captor of St Lucia and Trinidad, 1795–6, and a participant in the Helder expedition of 1799, it was his army which defeated the remnant of Napoleon’s garrison of Egypt at the battle of Aboukir (Alexandria), 1 March 1801, in which he was killed.

His brother Robert Abercromby (1740–1827) defeated Tippu Sultan (q.v.) in 1792.

Abul Hassan see Muley Hacen.

Akbar (1542–1605) Soldier and Mogul emperor of India. The Mogul empire, which was founded by Babur (q.v.), reached its finest flowering under his grandson Akbar. Born in exile, for his father Huma had been forced from his throne, he began his war of reconquest and acquisition at the age of fifteen, although he owed much to the advice of his guardian Bairam. In 1560 he took power for himself, and began a life which involved almost constant war. By the time of his death, his armies dominated the Indian subcontinent, from the Hindu Kush to the Godavari river in the south.

Akbar inherited a sound military system, based on strategic fortresses garrisoned by loyal troops and a largely cavalry army in the field. Much of the best cavalry in India was Hindu, and Akbar was remarkable for his ability to incorporate Hindu elements within his Moslem state. He married Rajput princesses, firstly in the early stages of his conquest of Rajputana, and secondly to consolidate their goodwill. He maintained the power structure of the Rajput kingdoms, and relied heavily on them for military support. He extended the traditional army by creating an artillery force and a regular infantry, some 12,000 strong, and armed with firearms. To support his conquests he revolutionized the tax structure of his domains, collecting taxes in cash rather than in kind. To administer his territories he introduced many of the Persian patterns and concepts of government, together with the lax Persian attitude towards the strict interpretation of Islam.

The success of Akbar as a ruler was that he recognized that India could not be ruled without the co-operation of Hindu society, and he abolished all the restraints under which Hinduism traditionally operated in Moslem states. He suffered the usual crop of revolts, the most serious by his son Salim in 1601. Akbar crushed the rebellion, but pardoned his son, a decision he was to regret when he was poisoned by Salim four years later. Akbar himself was not a great field commander, relying on his generals, especially the Rajput Raja Todar Malla.

Albert I (1875–1934) Belgian king and war leader. Born at the palace of Laeken, son of the Count of Flanders, Albert succeeded his uncle Leopold II in 1909. Faced by the German demand for free passage through Belgium (for their armies) in August 1914, he refused and put himself at the head of his own tiny army to oppose them. After its retreat to Antwerp in August, he directed its counter-offensive, 9–12 September 1914, and then its defence of the Antwerp fortress, 28 September–9 October. Overwhelmed by superior forces, the army was forced to retreat across the Yser into the north-western corner of Belgium, where Albert set up his headquarters at Furnes. There he remained for the rest of the war, in daily contact with his troops in the front line. His intelligence, regal bearing, dignity and sincerity made him one of the few genuinely and internationally popular figures of the First World War.

Albrecht, Archduke (1817–95) Austrian field-marshal, the victor of the battle of Custozza (1866) and the leading military figure in the Austro-Hungarian empire. The eldest son of the Archduke Charles (q.v.), the only Austrian general ever to defeat Napoleon (Aspern 1809), Albrecht inherited his father’s mantle as a great commander. In 1848 he commanded the regiments in Vienna which, on his orders, fired on the crowds, thereby stimulating the revolutionary outbreak in the city. In the war of 1859 in Italy, Albrecht was sent to Germany to drum up support for the Austrian cause, but Prussian prevarication frustrated his efforts at gaining worthwhile military help against Italy and France. After the war ended with the loss of half of Austria’s lands in northern Italy, the army was drastically reformed: Albrecht, despite his comparatively junior status, was destined for the command of the Austrian northern army in the event of a major war. However, when the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 broke out, Albrecht was suddenly shifted to the southern (Italian) front. Many reasons have been given for this sudden switch, most of them highly discreditable to the Emperor Franz Joseph and to Albrecht. More charitably, Albrecht’s replacement Benedek (q.v.), who had until then been in command of the Italian army, was a much older and more experienced soldier, and the northern command was his by right and by public opinion. But the switch meant that he went down into an ignominious and catastrophic defeat by the Prussians at Königgrätz, while Albrecht reaped the benefit of his well-drilled and confident army, as well as a very expert staff, to defeat the Italian general La Marmora (q.v.) at the battle of Custozza, on 25 June 1866. It was a cautious man’s battle, taking advantage of a carefully chosen strong natural site, and letting the enemy come to him. Yet the same caution stopped him from exploiting his victory, and the Italians were allowed to retire, bruised but intact.

After the war ended, despite Albrecht’s victory, with the loss of the remaining province in Italy, and Austria’s expulsion from Germany, the success at Custozza was the one relief to an otherwise gloomy picture. As a result, Albrecht was given an eminence which, strictly speaking, his achievement did not justify. He was created first commander-in-chief of the army, and then inspector-general of the army. He was a firm conservative in all matters, military and civil, and took to writing pamphlets lamenting the state of the army’s morale, as well as fighting a fierce rearguard action against all forms of innovation. As Austria-Hungary’s leading soldier his views carried great weight, and much of the Austrian failure in the First World War can be traced back to his long period of power. He suffered from poor eyesight from his childhood; in his last years he was nearly blind. But his handicap did not deter him from exercising his powers right up to his death. Albrecht’s influence came through his intransigence and supreme confidence in his role and mission. A stern and austere figure, he was a Habsburg more in the mould of the sixteenth century than of the effete and decadent nineteenth. His power was that of the bureaucrat, not the fighting soldier, and his thirty years of command over the peacetime Habsburg army made it a flabby instrument of war.

Alekseev, Mikhail Vasilievich (1857–1918) Russian general. The son of a private soldier, Alekseev succeeded in acquiring an offier’s education, passed the staff college in 1890, became a general in 1904 and in 1914 went to war as chief of staff of the south-western army group. He planned the successful offensive into Galicia (4–11 September), which resulted in the fall of the great fortress of Przemysl and, but for the subordinate Russian army commanders’ besetting fault of wirelessing each other en clair (see Rennenkampf and Samsonov), would have led to the annihilation of the Austrian field army. In March 1915 he moved to command the north-western army group and in August he succeeded the Grand Duke Nicholas (q.v.) as chief of staff of the army, with command of the European theatre of operations. Distressed by the tsar’s interference in strategy, which he believed was helping Russia to lose the war, Alekseev attempted to limit his power by ultimatum but was forestalled and obliged to resign in the autumn of 1916. In March 1917 he helped to engineer Nicholas II’s abdication and was reappointed chief of staff but resigned on 21 May in protest at Kerensky’s failure to halt the dissolution of the army. He then gravitated towards Kornilov (q.v.) but, after the failure of that general’s coup and the success of the Bolshevik revolution, he made his way to the Don, where he began to organize the White Army. Military command of it soon passed, however, to Kornilov, Alekseev retaining responsibility only for political affairs. He died of natural causes before the Civil War had fully broken out.

Alexander, Harold (1st Earl Alexander of Tunis; 1891–1969) British general and Allied commander-in-chief. Alex, as he was known throughout the British (and American) army, was the younger son of one of those Irish Protestant land-owning families (his father was Lord Caledon) which have produced so many of Britain’s leading soldiers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But he stands above and apart even among that illustrious band by his apparent possession of every military virtue: total physical and moral courage, athletic prowess, intelligence, charm amounting to real charisma and complete perfection of manners. ‘The only man’, said Montgomery (q.v.) – who temperamentally abhorred subordination – ‘under whom … any general … would gladly serve in a subordinate position.’

Commissioned into the Irish Guards from Sandhurst (following Harrow) in 1910, Alexander rose quickly to command the 1st Battalion, and by the end of the war, at the cost of three wounds, had won the DSO, MC and many foreign decorations. Unwilling to surrender the pleasures of fighting, which he intensely enjoyed, he secured an attachment to the British forces in the Baltic and during 1919–20 commanded a militia of German-Latvians which he had raised. His inter-war career was conventional but successful and in 1939 he was commanding the 1st Division of the BEF. Promoted to lieutenant-general and to the command of I Corps after Dunkirk, he had a short spell of command in Burma, at an unhappy moment of the war, and then in 1942 was sent to Egypt as overall commander of British and Allied forces in the Western Desert.

The smoothness of the relationship he established with Montgomery and later with the Americans of the army which landed in North Africa made him the obvious choice for a supreme command, which he assumed (1943) over the British and American armies invading Italy. He retained the Italian command until the end of the war and with it the confidence and devotion of the most disparate of all the Allied armies, containing as it did (besides Britons) Indians, Canadians, Americans, Poles, Italians and Brazilians. After the war Alexander was appointed governor-general of Canada and was immensely successful in the post (1946–52), and then less happily minister of defence (1952–4). In 1962 he published his Memoirs, a disappointing book written by another hand. His reputation will rest on his achievements as an inter-Allied military diplomat, as a beau idéal to regular officers of his generation and as an Irish Guardsman of legendary courage.

Allen, Ethan (1738–89) American soldier and politician. Remembered as the commander of the ‘Green Mountain Boys’, a band of irregulars in the American War of Independence, Allen (like his men) found his loyalties torn between an intense local patriotism and a much less clearly defined duty to the new nation. But in May 1775 he and his men disobeyed orders and launched a surprise attack on Fort Ticonderoga, which they managed to capture. Shortly afterwards, his comrades voted him out of office as their commander, and his chapter of woe was completed when he was captured by the British. As the victor of Ticonderoga, he was an object of their horrified curiosity and he was shipped to England as a prisoner. However, he was eventually paroled to New York City and was able (by devious means) to join Washington at Valley Forge. As much a politician as a soldier, Allen used his position for the benefit of his friends and his home state in quarrels with its neighbours; indeed, he soon became embroiled in a boundary dispute with the state of New Hampshire. His one contribution of any significance to military history was the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, which came at a crucial formative stage of the war when the rebels badly needed a victory.

Allenby, Edmund Henry Hynman (1st Viscount Allenby of Megiddo; 1861–1936) British field-marshal. The son of an East Anglian country gentleman, Allenby was commissioned in 1882 into the 6th Inniskilling Dragoons. In the Boer War he rose to command a cavalry column and in 1909, as major-general, was appointed inspector-general of cavalry. It was from this post that he transferred to lead the hastily formed cavalry division to France in 1914. Allenby’s violent verbal outbursts had now become legendary in the army and he was one of its most detested – if grudgingly respected – generals. The conditions of trench warfare gave him little opportunity to show whether this respect was deserved, however, for as Third Army commander, which he became in October 1915, he controlled a front on which no offensive took place until the spring of 1917. The battle of Arras, which he directed, may be thought a success.

Allenby was then transferred to command the British forces in Palestine, which he found in a state of low morale. This, by his noisy visits from unit to unit, he did much to raise and under his command the army won a succession of victories over the Turks, capturing Beersheba and Gaza and, on 9 December 1917, Jerusalem. Lack of men and supplies prevented him launching a final offensive against the Turks until the following September when, in the battle of Megiddo, his forces and those of the sherif of Mecca under Lawrence defeated the remains of the Turkish army and captured Damascus. After the war, Allenby became high commissioner in Egypt and oversaw its translation from protectorate to nominal independence. He died in retirement. His inter-war reputation as an inspired cavalry leader appears, in retrospect, inflated, and he looks increasingly the archetype of the overbearing cavalry general whose un-mindfulness of casualties was one of the most unattractive traits of British military leadership in the First World War. It is believed that Allenby was the model for the central character in C.S. Forester’s remarkable novel The General.

Ali Arslan (1741–1822) Pasha of Jannina; Ottoman despot and soldier. Born in Albania, at Tebelen, of which his family had traditionally held the title of bey, Ali Arslan regained the title, despite a career of brigandage, by his defence of the local Ottoman borders against the Austrians and the Russians. Becoming in time pasha of Tricala, in Thessaly, in 1787 and Jannina (Epirus) in 1788, he soon established his power over the whole of Albania, at the cost of massacring the Suliots, a Christian people who had long resisted Turkish rule. Bonaparte tried unsuccessfully to make him an ally: the British succeeded by ceding him the port of Parga in 1814 and he eventually extended his power to include the whole of Epirus. Eventually judged by the Ottoman government to have become too powerful, he was besieged by a Turkish army in Jannina in 1822 and killed. His nickname Arslan means ‘Lion’, and he has been called ‘The Mohammedan Bonaparte’.

Alva, Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, duque de (1508–83) Spanish soldier. To his many detractors, Alva is the incarnation of the most savage spirit of the Counter-Reformation, notorious for the excessive repression of the Netherlands (1567–72), and his belief that the only good heretic was a burning one. But these events occurred at the end of a long and successful career and should not cloud an impressi...