Personnel
La Guard recule!
Napoleon addresses the Old Guard as it prepares to attack the Anglo-Allied centre at Waterloo. “La Garde recule. Sauve qui peut!” Napoleon did not have much time in which to unleash the Imperial Guard onto the Anglo-Allied line, as von Zieten’s column had already reached the hamlet of Smohain, thereby allowing Wellington to bring troops in from his left flank…
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Wars Involving Landsknechts
Swiss mercenaries and landsknechte engaged in a push of pike (engraving by Hans Holbein the Younger, early 16th century) The War of the League of Cambrai (1508–1516) The War of the League of Cambrai, also known as the War of the Holy League and by other names, too, was a…
Aleksander Rodimstev
General Rodimtsev pictured with soldiers from his division. Stalingrad, September 26, 1942. Soviet general Alexander Rodimtsev’s 13th Guards Division held a shrinking promontory of land in central Stalingrad, and as the Germans pushed along the Volga its position began to splinter. Wehrmacht troops flooded Rodimtsev’s HQ, located in a conduit…
Combat in the American Civil War I
In purely military terms, the War between the States had one foot in the past and one in the future: part Napoleonic and part World War I. It was a war that for the first three years of its four-year course was rooted in the tactical tradition of the black-powder…
Combat in the American Civil War II
The frontal charge is a desperate thing; and running through so many Civil War battles is a melancholy acceptance of inevitable death: “Every man vieing with his fellowman, in steadiness of step and correct alignment, the officers giving low and cautionary commands, many knowing that it was their last hour…
Combat in the American Civil War III
An insouciant attitude toward death was highly esteemed among the officer class of both sides, and there are many examples of sangfroid in the face of extreme danger. Indeed some, such as George Custer, relished testing their staff officers in “an almost sadistic imposition of the leader’s courage on others,”…
Foglore Division
In 1940 a tiny British army had defeated a far larger Italian one and from 1941 to 1942, an outnumbered and under-resourced Italo-German one had fairly consistently got the better of a British one. How had this happened? The answers in each case were: equipment; the tactics and training of…