A History of Modern Urban Operations

Gregory Fremont-Barnes

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030270872
• eBook ISBN: 9783030270889
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book investigates the complexities of modern urban operations—a particularly difficult and costly method of fighting, and one that is on the rise. Contributors examine the lessons that emerge from a range of historical case studies, from nineteenth-century precedents to the Battle of Shanghai; Stalingrad, German town clearance, Mandalay, and Berlin during World War II; and from the Battle of Algiers to the Battle for Fallujah in 2004. Each case study illuminates the features that differentiate urban operations from fighting in open areas, and the factors that contribute to success and failure. The volume concludes with reflections on the key challenges of urban warfare in the twenty-first century and beyond.

© The Author(s) 2020

G. Fremont-Barnes (ed.)A History of Modern Urban Operationshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27088-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Nineteenth-Century Precedents

Gregory Fremont-Barnes¹

(1)

Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Camberley, UK

End Abstract

The nineteenth century offers many fewer examples of urban fighting than for the century which followed; armies required space to manoeuvre in the field and the considerably less destructive firepower of the era generally ill-suited belligerents unless they opted to fight on unconventional terms. By the time of the First World War, the fronts either included few built-up areas or the concentration of heavy artillery simply obliterated them, leaving nothing left standing to dignify as a town or city. As it happened, once the trench lines of the Western Front became more or less established—and, indeed, effectively static for nearly four years from the autumn of 1914—urban operations seldom figured, at least not on a substantial scale. The much more fluid, mobile and fast-paced nature of the Second World War certainly altered this to some extent; much of the fighting in Europe and North Africa took place across open ground where rapidly moving infantry, armour and artillery, with or without air support, could largely avoid the frustration and heavy casualties attendant upon combat in built-up areas. Still, urban warfare played a significant part, particularly in Italy and the on Eastern front, contrasting sharply with operations in North Africa and on the contested islands of the Pacific.

Coverage of nineteenth-century urban operations could conceivably cover a number of actions drawn from the Napoleonic Wars, such as those fought at Austerlitz (1805), Buenos Aires (1806 and 1807), Montevideo (1807), Corunna and Aspern-Essling (1809), and at Lützen, Dresden and Leipzig (1813)—to name some of the most prominent examples. One might also examine the street-fighting which exemplified the revolution of 1830 in Paris, and the independence movements of the same year in Belgium and Poland which sparked clashes in the streets of Brussels and Warsaw, respectively. The revolutions of 1848 witnessed further urban clashes across Europe, most notably in Paris, Berlin, Milan, Vienna, and Prague, which became the focus of bitter clashes between civilians and soldiers. Entirely conventional forces opposed one another at the battles of Monterrey (1846) during the US-Mexican War and at Fredericksburg (1862) during the American Civil War, while the sieges of Delhi and Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny (1857–1858) provide further insight into the nature of urban combat, as would an examination of the bloody contest played out on the streets of Paris between government troops and the Communards in 1871.

This chapter will focus on three Napoleonic battles, which in their own ways exemplify most of the key features present in the examples cited above: Saragossa, which involved a largely civilian population pitted against a conventional military force; Fuentes de Oñoro, which centred around a small village serving as the attacker’s primary objective; and Plancenoit, a village occupying only a small—but vitally important—sector of a much larger, open battlefield, that of Waterloo.

Saragossa, 27 January–20 February 1809

Following Napoleon’s occupation of Spain in May 1808, the Emperor’s brother, Joseph, assumed the throne after the arrest and forcible exile of the rightful sovereign, and a major rising took place in Madrid among the population, causing resistance to spread rapidly across the country. The regular Spanish armies suffered repeated and disastrous defeats at the hands of the French—many of them veterans of the great campaigns of 1805–1807 against the Austrians, Russians, and Prussians—enabling the invaders to appear in June before the great city of Saragossa, to which they laid siege. As preparations for defence were incomplete, General Jean-Antoine Verdier attempted to carry the city by assault, only to find his troops repulsed at every turn by armed civilians crowding windows and doors, showering the attackers with musket fire and stubbornly disputing possession of every structure. Verdier altered tack, surrounding the city and undertaking a proper siege, until the disastrous capitulation of General Pierre Dupont’s army at Bailen in July 1808 obliged the French to withdraw all forces behind the river Ebro.

Undaunted by this setback, Napoleon rapidly recovered his position by placing himself at the head of a new army and crossing the Pyrenees. By the end of the year, he had defeated Spanish forces and retaken Madrid, in the process driving to the north-west coast of Spain for ignominious evacuation by the Royal Navy the British expeditionary force which had landed in Portugal the previous August. These propitious circumstances enabled the French to renew offensive operations across the Peninsula, badly defeating the Spanish at Tudela, whence many fugitives took refuge in Saragossa, to which the victorious French laid siege for a second time, with the investment and bombardment commencing in January 1809. The population had spent weeks preparing the city’s defences and, in the words of Count Marbot, who took part in operations:

The peasants were the most determined; they had entered the town with their wives, their children, and even their herds. Each party of them had a quarter of the town, or a house, assigned to it for its dwelling place, which they were sworn to defend…Religious fanaticism and the sacred love of country exalted their courage, and they blindly resigned themselves to the will of God…The besieged only agreed on one point: to defend themselves to the death.¹

The stage was set for the greatest urban battle of the Napoleonic era.

Marshal Jean Lannes ordered an attack on the breaches on 27 January, after most of the Spaniards’ batteries had been silenced, though the defenders continued to employ their small arms to harass the French sappers and gunners. General Louis-François Lejeune, the chief engineer, noted how:

Such was the intrepidity of the Spaniards that at the very moment when a cannon ball made its hole in the wall of a house, those who were inside it at once used this hole as a loophole through which to fire their muskets, even though it often happened that a second cannon ball would send the wall crashing down on its defenders. Everywhere, they could be seen building barricades in the midst of the debris.²

French siege guns eventually established three breaches large enough to facilitate an assault between the Santa Monica convent on the French right and the monastery of Santa Engracia on the left, under the latter of which sappers had also placed mines. In the afternoon, three companies of infantry stood poised, ready for the assault; once these had penetrated the walls and secured the breaches, the plan called for whole regiments, waiting in the trenches, to follow in their wake, together with light artillery which would be manhandled into the city to support the infantry. Once the mist cleared by midday, engineers detonated the mines under Santa Engracia and the columns quickly advanced, their approach heralded by the peel of the city’s church bells and the sound of gunfire from defenders on the walls and houses overlooking the breach (Maps 1.1 and 1.2).

Map 1.1

Saragossa, January–February 1809: Santa Engracia sector

(Source Rudorff, Raymond. War to the Death: The Sieges of Saragossa, 1808–1809. New York: Macmillan, 1974, p. 218)

Map 1.2

Saragossa, January–February 1809: Eastern sector

(Source Rudorff, Raymond. War to the Death: The Sieges of Saragossa, 1808–1809. New York: Macmillan, 1974, p. 219)

French troops entered the convent’s two gardens, where they came under intense musketry from the terraces surrounding them and a cannon firing grapeshot from only twenty-five yards away. From the upper terrace, two further cannon swept the gardens with their fire, accompanied by 800 defenders—regular infantry, citizens of all ages and both sexes wielding muskets, pistols and blunderbusses—firing from windows and embrasures cut into the convent’s walls. After a bitter struggle, the French managed to seize the whole of the convent of Santa Engracia; the mines demolished half the exterior walls of the monastery, and a detachment of Polish infantry, spearheaded by sappers and followed by the remainder of the regiment, bolted across 200 yards of unobstructed ground only to discover a second wall with a breach just large enough to accommodate access to a handful of soldiers simultaneously. Notwithstanding the dreadful fire, the Poles forced their way into the main building, engaging in fierce hand-to-hand fighting before emerging into a small square, the Plaza de Santa Engracia, seizing the houses around it and exchanging fire with Spaniards lining the walls between the convent and the Pino Tower. Soon the attackers came upon the Carmen gate and charged into the Trinitarian monastery, bayoneting the gunners defending it and forcing out its defenders. Elsewhere, in the centre breach created in the walls facing the San José monastery, French light infantry stormed the breach and discovered themselves in the city’s main oil press; from there they emerged to capture several houses but found themselves blocked from further progress by a group of small abodes fashioned into a triangular block of miniature fortresses.

The French failed in their attack on Santa Monica, but partial success at the other two breaches secured for them control of two large wedges protruding into the city. In the meantime, the French found every house, convent, monastery and public building had been fortified; absolutely no prospect existed, at least at this initial phase, of compelling the inhabitants to surrender. The precepts of siege warfare—certainly those observed throughout the eighteenth century—laid down that once a practicable breach had been made in a city’s walls the commander of the garrison could surrender with honour on the basis that he could not expect to hold the city against a numerically superior enemy. Capitulation agreed under such circumstances theoretically protected the townspeople from looting, rape, and perhaps even wholesale massacre.

The Saragossans, however, aware of widespread French depredations already widely committed across Spain—not least the obscene violation of places of worship—stood utterly determined to defend the city to the death. Inhabitants of all walks of life, together with soldiers, barricaded every house and loopholed as many as possible; whole districts snaked with labyrinths of tunnels, many linked to houses, trenches, ditches, and barricades, all held by fanatical defenders—soldiers, peasants, clergymen and city-dwellers—prepared to hold them at all costs with whatever weapons came to hand: firearms, knives, hatchets, farm implements, clubs, and even bits of masonry, bricks, and rubble strewn everywhere by the assiduous work of French siege guns. Women and children loaded muskets, carried ammunition, and aided the wounded, while priests and monks frequently carried heavy crucifixes, as much as weapons as for encouraging the faithful in their struggle against those who would profane a deeply religious society which condemned the invaders as the worst of infidels: apostates of an atheistic revolution.

Meanwhile, French and Polish infantry continued to funnel into Santa Engracia, engaging the defenders from room to room, through cloisters, along corridors and up staircases—all ferociously held. Makeshift barricades of wool sacks and even piles of books removed from the shelves of the monastic library offered only temporary cover but played their part in barring—or at least slowing—French progress. Elsewhere, fighting a bloody path across a ditch and forcing their way through windows and the artillery embrasures cut into the walls, the French burst into the Trinitarian monastery where combatants neither offered nor received quarter—a ubiquitous feature of the fighting. Those defending the churches and chapels put up the most determined resistance, with altars, shrines, and statues witnesses to savage fighting, in the course of which a ricocheting round shot wounded Lejeune.

By the conclusion of the first day’s fighting, the French had lost over 600 men, with very little progress to show for such considerable losses; little could they have imagined that three more weeks of this carnage were to follow. Hostile inhabitants still occupied the houses extending from the Plaza de Santa Engracia and the French held only a handful of houses in the prominent thoroughfare known as the Calle Pabostre. The defenders had moreover blocked all the approaches to a major thoroughfare known as the Coso and the convent of Santa Monica remained heavily defended despite an open breach. All the while, fires caused by French shelling burned throughout the city, creating a hellish scene of devastation punctuated by the cries of Spanish wounded, whose comrades carried to the area around the cathedral for rudimentary medical attention. Yet despite the casualties—compounded by an epidemic created as a result of the French blockade—Spanish morale stood remarkably high.

Lannes, an experienced corps commander, well understood that he could not sustain casualties at the current rate if fighting of such a ferocious nature was to continue for any length of time. In planning to seize his principal objective, the Coso, his forces would first have to reach the boulevard, before which stood several substantial and heavily defended buildings well s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Nineteenth-Century Precedents
• 2. Armageddon Rehearsed: The Battle of Shanghai, August–November 1937
• 3. The Battle of Stalingrad, September–November 1942
• 4. ‘The Rest of the Day Was Perfectly Bloody’: The 51st Highland Division and Town Clearance in Germany, February–March 1945
• 5. ‘Come Ye Back to Mandalay’: 14th Army’s Battle for Mandalay, March 1945
• 6. The Battle of Berlin, April–May 1945
• 7. Rocking the Casbah: 10 Parachute Division and the Battle for Algiers—1957
• 8. Among the Ashes of Emperors: Operation Hue City—January 1968
• 9. ‘Live Nobly, Die Gloriously’: The Battle for Saigon—Tet 1968
• 10. ‘Acting with Restraint and Courtesy, Despite Provocation?’ Army Operations in Belfast During the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’, 1969–2007
• 11. ‘Its Flames Will Blaze’: The Battle for Fallujah, 7–13 November 2004
• 12. The Poisoned Chalice: Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century and Beyond
• Back Matter