Warlords

The warlords: Adolf Hitler
Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 at Braunau am Inn, not far from the German border in what was then Austria-Hungary. He was the fourth of six children of Alois Hitler, whom he described in Mein Kampf as an 'irascible tyrant', and Klara Pölzl, Alois's niece and third wife.
Young Adolf was reportedly a good student, but in 1905, at the age of 16, he left school without graduating. He took up a Bohemian life as a struggling painter, despite having been rejected twice by Vienna's Academy of Arts for lack of talent.
Wagner and politics
It was in Vienna that Hitler became an active anti-Semite, influenced by the pseudoscientific and neo-religious writings of the race ideologist Lanz von Liebenfels and by the polemics of certain politicians. Hitler came to believe in the superiority of the 'Aryan race', and claimed that the Jews, its natural enemies, were responsible for Germany's economic problems. However, according to his roommate at the time, Hitler was more interested in Wagner's operas than in politics.He gradually ran out of money and, by 1910, had settled permanently in a house for poor working men. Then in May 1913, on receiving a small inheritance, he moved to Munich, where he became interested in architecture and the racist writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. When Germany entered the in August 1914, he immediately enlisted in the Bavarian army.
World War I
Hitler saw active service as a messenger for the 16th Bavarian reserve infantry regiment in France and Belgium, and was twice cited for bravery in action. In October 1916 in northern France, he was wounded in the leg, but by the beginning of March, he had been returned to the front. He was unpopular with his comrades because of his uncritical attitude towards officers.
Shortly before the war ended, Hitler was admitted to a field hospital, apparently blinded following a poison gas attack. However, recent research suggests that the blindness, which proved temporary, may have been an hysterical reaction to the likely prospect of Germany losing the war.
Having become a passionate German patriot (though he did not become a citizen until 1932), he was shocked by Germany's capitulation in November 1918, sharing the general misapprehension that the army remained undefeated. Like many other German nationalists, Hitler blamed the politicians – the 'November criminals' – for the surrender and the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which declared Germany responsible for unleashing the Great War on the world.Scapegoats and spies
Hitler remained in the army, which was now mainly engaged in suppressing the socialist uprisings breaking out across Germany. He took part in 'national thinking' courses organised by the Bavarian Reichswehr [national militia] Group, whose key purpose was to create scapegoats for the outbreak of the war and Germany's defeat. The ones they identified were 'international Jewry', Communists and virtually all politicians.
In July 1919, Hitler became a police spy for the Reichswehr, and was assigned to infiltrate the small nationalist German Workers' Party (DAP). After his discharge from the army in 1920, he devoted himself full time to the DAP, soon becoming its leader and changing its name to the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), usually known as the Nazi party.Hitler's oratory – attacking Jews, socialists, liberals, capitalists and Communists – began attracting adherents. Early followers included Rudolf Hess, Hermann Göring, and Ernst Röhm, who became head of the Nazis' paramilitary organisation, the SA. Another admirer was wartime General Erich Ludendorff. In November 1923, Hitler decided to use Ludendorff as a front in an attempt to seize power in Munich: the 'Beer Hall Putsch'. However, instead, Hitler was arrested and sentenced to five years' imprisonment. While at Landsberg prison, he dictated his political memoirs Mein Kampf (My Struggle) to Hess; then, considered relatively harmless, he was given an early amnesty and released in December 1924.
Rise to power
For Hitler, the turning point was the Depression, which hit Germany in 1930. The democratic Weimar Republic was unable to cope, and in the September 1930 election, the Nazis rose from relative obscurity to win more than 18% of the vote and 107 seats in the Reichstag, becoming the second largest party in the country. Two years later, Hitler competed against the elderly Paul von Hindenburg in the presidential election, coming in second.
The Nazis and the Communists now jointly controlled a majority in the Reichstag, which made the formation of a stable coalition government of mainstream parties impossible. After a vote of no-confidence in the government, the Reichstag was dissolved and a new election was called for November 1932.
The Zentrumspartei (Centre Party) began negotiating with Hitler to secure Nazi participation in a new government. In return, he demanded the chancellorship, along with the president's agreement that he would have emergency powers. This was refused, and in the election, the Nazis lost votes although they remained the largest party. However, when it proved impossible to form a coalition government without them, Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor and he was sworn in on 30 January 1933.
Loss of liberty
After the Reichstag building was set on fire on 27 February 1933 (and a mentally ill Dutch Communist blamed – and executed – for it), civil liberties were suspended. Following the expulsion of the Communist deputies from the Reichstag by the Nazis, Hitler was given dictatorial authority: other parties were suppressed and all opposition banned. When the 86-year-old Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, Hitler took on the powers of president as well and became known as 'Führer' – leader. Then, in an unprecedented step, he ordered every member of the military to swear a personal oath of allegiance to him.
Hitler remained overwhelmingly popular with the Germans until the very end. A master orator – and with all of the media under the control of his propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels – he persuaded most of the population that he was their saviour from the Depression, the Communists, the Versailles Treaty and the Jews.
He oversaw one of the greatest expansions of industrial production that Germany had ever seen. He was also responsible for one of the largest infrastructure improvement campaigns in German history, with the construction of dozens of dams, autobahns, railroads and other civil works. As a result, even before military production began, unemployment was greatly lessened, if not (as Nazi propaganda would have it) abolished.
Night of the long knives
However, those who were not Hitler's supporters were dealt with by the SA, SS and Gestapo (secret state police). Thousands disappeared into concentration camps. Many more emigrated, including about half of Germany's Jews. Under the 1935 Nuremberg laws, they lost their German citizenship and were expelled from government employment, the professions and most forms of economic activity.
Even Hitler's supporters were not safe, however – including Ernst Röhm's SA, which had become unpopular with most of the influential political and military groups in Germany. Hitler ordered Röhm's murder and that of dozens of other real and potential enemies during the night of 29 June 1934 – later known as the 'night of the long knives'.In March 1935, Hitler repudiated the Treaty of Versailles by reintroducing conscription in Germany. He set about building a massive military machine, including a new navy (Kriegsmarine) and air force (Luftwaffe). A year later, he again violated the treaty by reoccupying the demilitarised zone in the Rhineland. When Britain and France did nothing, he grew bolder, sending troops into the Spanish Civil War to support Franco. Spain served as a testing ground for Germany's new armed forces, including the bombing of undefended towns such as Guernica.
The road to war
On 12 March 1938, Hitler – having pressured his native Austria into the Anschluss: unification with Germany – made a triumphal entry into Vienna. Next he claimed that Germans in the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia were being mistreated and demanded that the region be incorporated into the Third Reich. This led to the Munich Agreement of September 1938, in which Britain and France weakly gave way to his demands, averting war but ultimately failing to save Czechoslovakia. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain hailed it as 'Peace in our time', and Hitler was named Time magazine's 'Man of the Year'. The German army entered Prague on 10 March 1939.
On 23 August 1939, Hitler concluded a secret non-aggression pact with , whom he had described in Mein Kampf as a 'common blood-stained criminal' and 'the scum of humanity'. They also agreed a secret protocol to carve up Poland between them.
In the last week of August, Hitler remarked to his generals: 'Genghis Khan had millions of men and women killed by his own will and with a gay heart. History sees him only as a great state builder. And who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?' On 1 September, Germany invaded Poland. Then Britain and France, who had guaranteed assistance to Poland, declared war on Germany.
Mass murder and genocide
By the end of September, Germany had conquered Poland, SS units having killed 60,000 Jews plus members of the Polish ruling class. It was Hitler's first experience of mass murder, and profoundly influenced him. It had shown him that his followers would actually carry it out.
On 5 November 1937, Hitler had stated his plans for acquiring Lebensraum (living space) for the German people. This policy would eventually result in the SS, assisted by collaborationist governments and recruits from occupied countries, systematically murdering approximately 11 million people, 6 million of them Jews, in concentration camps and ghettos and via mass executions, or through less systematic methods. Besides being shot or gassed to death, many also died of starvation and disease while working as slave labourers. This genocide – or, as the Nazis called it, 'final solution' – was planned and ordered by leading Nazis. While no specific order from Hitler authorising the mass killing of the Jews has surfaced, there is documentation that he approved the Einsatzgruppen (Nazi death squads), and the evidence also suggests that he agreed in principle to mass murder by gassing.
To Hitler, mass murder was just another weapon in the ideological struggle. To him, the state was supreme and individuals were its disposable tool. He even extended this idea to his domestic life. Hitler had secret mistresses, most notably Eva Braun, but in public no woman could come between him and his nation. One of his secretaries would later recall that he emphasised again and again: 'My lover is Germany.'
Peace with Britain?
Hitler built up his forces further during what was commonly called the Sitzkrieg (sitting war) in Germany and the 'phoney war' in Britain. This ended in March 1940 when Hitler ordered German forces to march into Denmark and Norway, then, in May, to attack France, conquering the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Belgium in the process. France surrendered on 22 June 1940. To Hitler, this string of victories finally avenged Germany's defeat in World War I.It also convinced his main ally, the Italian dictator , to join the war on Germany's side.
Britain, whose forces had been driven from France at Dunkirk, continued to fight on alone. However, Hitler wanted peace with the British, now led by. Mussolini's foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, wrote in his diary:
Hitler makes many reservations on the desirability of dismantling the British empire, which he considers even today to be an important factor in world equilibrium. Hitler is now like the gambler who, having made a big win, would like to leave the table risking nothing more.
However, having had his peace overtures rejected by the British, Hitler ordered bombing raids as the prelude to a German invasion. This, in turn, led to the . However, by the end of October 1940, the RAF had defeated the Luftwaffe, and abandoning the idea of an invasion, Hitler ordered night-time bombing raids on British cities, including London and Coventry. This was the so-called Blitz, which lasted until May 1941.Letting the cat out of the bag
Hitler, meanwhile, was beginning to regret his alliance with Stalin. In June 1940, alarm bells had gone off when the Soviets had occupied northern Bukovina (then part of Romania) – not part of the pact with the Nazis. Then, when Stalin told Hitler that he had received an appeal from Churchill, warning him against the Nazi leader and asking him to come over to Britain's side, Hitler interpreted this disclosure as the beginning of a conspiracy between Stalin and Churchill against him. This was why, he thought, the British were refusing to make peace with Germany – a feeling that was exacerbated by the attack on the Nazis in acceptance speech when nominated for a third term as president of the then neutral United States.
On 31 July, at his mountain headquarters at Obersalzburg, Hitler announced that 'the sooner Russia is crushed, the better.' What was a vague idea soon turned into a real plan when the invasion of Britain was called off. Then came the defining moment. On 12 November 1940, the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov arrived in Berlin at Hitler's invitation. Hitler's purpose in summoning him was to offer the USSR a share in the spoils of victory if it helped him to finish off the British. He told Molotov:
England's final capitulation is just a matter of time. Fragments of its empire will be left all over the world. It's time to think about division of this property without a master after our victory.
But Stalin wasn't interested in joining Hitler's war or in speculative carve-ups of the British empire. Despite performing the superficial courtesies, Molotov's cold arrogance and his needling on the question of territory in eastern Europe infuriated Hitler and that reinvigorated him. According to the diary of Major Engels, who was on Hitler's military staff: 'The talks had shown where the Russian plans were heading. Molotov had let the cat out of the bag. The Führer was really relieved. It would not even remain a marriage of convenience.'
Operation Barbarossa
On 18 December 1940, Hitler issued War Directive No. 23: 'The German Werhmacht must be prepared before the ending of the war against England to crush Soviet Russia in a rapid campaign.' The invasion date was set for May 1941.
At 3.30am on 22 June 1941, a few weeks after the target date, Hitler gave the signal for three million German troops to attack the Soviet Union. Six days earlier, he had said to his propaganda minister Goebbels:
That which we have spent our lives fighting, we will now annihilate. Whether right or wrong, we must win. And when we have won, who will ask about the method?
During the invasion, called Operation Barbarossa, Nazi forces seized huge amounts of territory, especially the Baltic states and Ukraine. Hitler wrote to Mussolini:
Since I struggled through to this decision [to invade], I again feel spiritually free. The partnership with the Soviet Union was often very irksome to me, for in some way or other it seemed to me to be a break with my whole origin, my concepts and my former obligations. I am happy now to be relieved of these mental agonies.
However, the Germans failed to achieve the quick triumph that Hitler had anticipated. Within six months, they had been stopped outside Moscow by the harsh winter and by fierce Soviet resistance.
Turning points
Hitler declared war against the United States on 11 December 1941, four days after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, presumably because of Germany's treaty with Japan. This set him against a coalition that included the world's largest empire (the British), the world's greatest industrial and financial power (the US) and the world's largest nation (the Soviet Union, which had switched sides and joined the Allies).
In late 1942, German forces under Field Marshal were defeated in the battle of El Alamein, thwarting Hitler's plans to seize the Suez Canal and the Middle East. In February 1943, the Battle of Stalingrad ended with the complete destruction of the German forces there. Both defeats were turning points in the war.
Retreat
Hitler's military judgement was becoming increasingly erratic, and Germany's military and economic positions were deteriorating. Hitler's health was also failing. His left hand started shaking uncontrollably – biographer Ian Kershaw believes that he was suffering from Parkinson's disease – and other symptoms have led historians to suggest that he was a methamphetamine addict and/or had syphilis.
Mussolini was overthrown in 1943 after British and American forces invaded Italy. Throughout 1943 and 1944, the Soviet Union steadily forced Hitler's armies into retreat along the eastern front. On 6 June 1944 – – Allied armies landed in northern France.
Realising that defeat was inevitable, some army officers plotted to assassinate Hitler. On 20 July 1944, Claus von Stauffenberg planted a bomb at his military headquarters, but the dictator narrowly escaped death. Savage reprisals followed, resulting in the torture and execution of more than 4,000 people. The resistance movement was crushed.
Defeat and death
By the end of 1944, the Soviets had driven the last German troops from their territory and began chasing them through central Europe. The western Allies were advancing into Germany. Although, by now, the Germans had lost the war militarily, Hitler refused to hold peace talks, and German forces continued to fight.
By April 1945, the Soviets were at the gates of Berlin. Hitler's closest advisers urged him to flee to Bavaria or Austria to make a last stand in the mountains, but he was determined to die in his capital. On 30 April 1945, as Stalin's troops battled their way toward the Reich Chancellory in the centre of Berlin, Hitler is generally believed to have committed suicide in his Führerbunker by shooting himself in the head. His body and that of Eva Braun, whom he had married the day before and who had died by taking cyanide, were burned, then buried in the Chancellory garden.
When Soviet forces reached the Chancellory, they exhumed Hitler's body, performed an autopsy and confirmed his identity using dental records. To avoid any possibility of creating a potential shrine, the remains were then secretly buried by Soviet intelligence in the German town of Magdeburg. In April 1970, when the facility was about to be turned over to the East German government, the remains were reportedly exhumed, thoroughly burned and disposed of in the Elbe river. A skull and part of a jaw in Moscow are said to be Hitler's (having been saved from the dental identification process). According to DNA taken from them and compared to that of surviving Hitler relatives, these fragments are most likely genuine.

Friend or foe?

War brought a huge influx of people to Britain. This tested the nerves of the migrants, brought fresh ideas to question Victorian values, and provided racists with scapegoats for all the ills of an Empire threatened by the conflict.
Divided loyalties'Looking back, I must have asked some awkward questions,' the late radical politician Phil Piratin says in his account of his life as a Jewish teenage son of immigrants immediately after the First World War (Our Flag Stays Red, Lawrence and Wishart).
'I remember being shaken when on one occasion I asked my father's friend, Dayan Rabbi Chakin (a 'Dayan' is a Jewish judge), how it was possible for the Chief Rabbi of Germany to call on the Jewish people to fight in the Kaiser's armies, and the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom to call on the British Jews to fight in the British armies, both Chief Rabbis knowing quite well that their fellow Jews would be fighting each other. I was quoted all kinds of references, the essence of which was that the Jewish people are strangers in a strange land, should be grateful for their shelter, and should conform with the policies... of the reigning Government. This... didn't satisfy me, as it was in conflict with the teachings of religion, in which I then believed, regarding international brotherhood.'
Immigration of all nationalities, races and colours increasingly brought this sort of questioning of the basics of what was then a fairly rigid hierarchical society – although the vast majority of immigrants wanted nothing more than to be able to fit into so-called normal British life (as is evident from Piratin's Dayan). Indeed, many changed their names to be more anglicised – Schmidt might become Smith, the Irish Gaelic Seoirse might become George and the Hebrew Yeshua might become Joshua.
People were prepared to die for their king – because the king was their superior and that was that – but when they may be killing their own relatives fighting for enemy countries, this sort of confidence was harder to sustain. On top of this, many Jewish people were suspicious of a war where one of the chief allies was Tsarist Russia, the country from which many of them had fled persecution.
In addition, with nationalism at its height thanks to wartime propaganda, many people were suspicious of anyone different. Jews were accused of profiteering or taking jobs, and the tension between the Jewish and gentile communities erupted into violence, notably in Bethnel Green, east London, in 1917, when 2,000 to 3,000 people fought battles in the streets.

Irish stew in the name of the law

CampNinety years on and the chickens are coming home to roost. Except they weren't chickens. They were shell-shocked. They were mentally ill. They were country lads completely out of their depth. At the end of 2004, a report commissioned by the Irish government was handed over to its British counterpart. In it was revealed damning evidence of the anti-Irish racism and fundamental injustice of British 'field general courts martial' during the First World War. These were military courts in the proximity of the front line, speedily dispensing exemplary 'justice' including death sentences.
The report contains a close examination of the cases of 26 Irish soldiers executed by firing squad. It asserts that, based on the evidence in the surviving files (the team had access to all but one), all the cases could have been successfully appealed had a normal set of legal standards been applied, including the need for sufficient proof and the proper consideration of medical evidence. The courts martial files were kept secret for 75 years by the British authorities, only being released in 1990.
If you were Irish – whether Protestant or Catholic, Ulsterman or Dubliner, whether fighting out of loyalty to the Union or for the promise of Home Rule – you were five times more likely to be shot by firing squad. In the rest of the British army one in every 3,000 troops was sentenced to execution in this way. Among the Irish soldiers the figurMaking an example
The report makes a revealing comparison between the Irish and the New Zealand regiments, which were known for their harsh discipline. The recruitment figures for both countries were similar and yet there were 10 times as many death sentences in the Irish regiments.
The indications of the 26 cases of execution – 23 for desertion, one for disobedience, one for quitting his post and one for striking an officer – are that death sentences were imposed as a form of exemplary discipline. The report describes the behaviour towards the Irish involved in these cases as 'capricious', 'inconsistent' and 'shocking'. It also condemns subsequent attempts by the British Ministry of Defence to justify this military justice in the field as 'fundamentally flawed'.
In 11 of the cases, the death sentence was clearly linked to bad discipline in the units and a perceived need to set an example. The report concludes:
'Soldiers were effectively condemned to be shot because of both the behaviour of others and the opinion of others as to their fighting potential.… Executing a soldier simply to deter their colleagues from contemplating a similar crime, or because their attitude in the face of the gravest of dangers was not what was expected – in some cases after only a matter of weeks of basic training – must be seen as unjust, and not deserving of the ultimate penalty.'e is one in less than 600.aign to clear the names of Irish soldiers executed by firing squad

International impact

The direct impact of the war on men and women, at home and in the trenches, is explored elsewhere on this site, but what were the repercussions and consequences of the war on an international level? Here we look at the complicated history of what happened, both politically and socially, when the storm of warfare over Europe subsided.Revolution
The greatest political repercussion of the war was undoubtedly the Russian Revolution and following civil war. Though unrest had stirred for a long time in Russia, the full force of the First World War, which caused over 9 million Russian casualties, was a colossal burden on the working classes. Genuine hatred of the ruling Tsars bubbled under the surface of society, and eventually revolution was guaranteed.
The February Revolution, which came to a crescendo in 1917, drove forward with liberal ideals and forced Tsar Nicolas II to submit. The new government, however – with its tsarist sympathisers and a penchant to continue with the war – could not last. The harder-lined Bolsheviks and Mensheviks of the Soviet movement, led by Lenin and Trotsky, crashed through the new government with their communist regime in the October Revolution of the same year. As peasants all over Russia rebelled against their masters, a civil war that was to cost countless lives gripped the nation.
On 3 March 1918, Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers and withdrew from the war. This had far-reaching effects, as the Central Powers now controlled vast areas of the east and could concentrate fully on the Western Front. Only the timely appearance of the Americans would now counterbalance the war and eventually tip the scales in the Allies' favour.
Treaties
The signing of treaties and the dividing up of worldwide concerns had effects that still resonate today. For example, the general collapse of the Ottoman Empire left Britain and France in control of much of the Middle East, whilst the Balfour Declaration of 1917, issued by Arthur Balfour (ex-Prime Minister and then Foreign Secretary), stated that Britain would allow a Jewish nation in Palestine. The treaties of Saint-Germain and Trianon, which dissolved the Austro-Hungarian Empire, sculpted the European landscape. States were reborn and created, and others, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria and Hungary, gained their independence. The Treaty of Versailles is infamous for its strict punishment of Germany – an action drawn on to great effect by the emerging Nazi regime of the 1930s, with obvious repercussions.

House of cards

How the wThe murderous gunshots of the Serbian activist, Gavrilo Princip, rang out on 28 June 1914. As the Habsburg heir Franz Ferdinand lay dead, the Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia. As far as the Austrians were concerned, this was a matter simply for the politics of their corner of eastern Europe. They could not foresee that this initial event was to have a momentous impact on the rest of the world.
Russian trade interests
The Bosporus and Dardanelles trade routes, which linked the east with Europe, guaranteed that Russia would be locked into any territorial struggles of the Balkans, if they were to protect their own interests.
Bosnia, Herzegovina and Serbia were main players in this strategically important yet volatile region, and a precarious structure of alliances between rival empires held the area in check. Though Russia had played diplomatic games with Austria-Hungary regarding the treatment of the Balkans, they were set against each other when Austria-Hungary finally annexed Serbia in 1908.
The Austro-Hungarian declaration of war against Serbia following the shooting of Franz Ferdinand automatically drew Russia into the war through their Slavic alliance.
No going back
Germany then followed in support of Austria. What looked like another Balkan war was destined to break into a full world war before it had even started.
France supported their pact with Russia and in return was invaded by Germany.
As Germany wheeled through Belgium, they broke another treaty in which Britain had agreed to protect the neutrality of the Belgian state. Within a matter of weeks the snowball effect had drawn a large part of the world into conflict.
Germany primed for war
Before the Serbian uprising, Germany, like most of the other European nations, already held plans for attacking neighbours should the need arise. Germany was a relatively new empire, which had come about as a result of the alternate bullying and diplomacy of Bismarck, the prime minister of Prussia under Kaiser Wilhelm I.
German actions to expand territory and influence before the war had already heated up tensions with Britain and America, while France was also still smarting from a Prussian campaign that had lost them the region of Alsace-Lorraine in the 1870s.
With tensions running high on the home front, and a desire to expand the German Empire even further, Kaiser Wilhelm II encouraged plans for a war as the best way to solve his problems. The Schlieffen Plan, drawn up by the Army Chief of Staff, Alfred von Schlieffen, was a carefully measured sequence of events that was to be set in motion in the event of a European war. Counting on both Russia and France joining the action, the Schlieffen Plan banked on a slow Russian mobilisation that would allow for the capturing of France first.
On 3 August 1914, Germany declared war on France to back Austria-Hungary. By 23 August, German troops were streaming across Belgium and onto French soilorld collapsed into war

The empires strike back

An imperial war
Expanding ambition
Those nations that became industrialised first found great advantage, as their manufacturing industries, transport networks and economies became stronger than those who were slow to adopt the methods of mass production.
Large imposing naval fleets and expanding armies were used in a race to claim parts of the world and colonise them in the name of empire, while natural resources such as minerals and exotic produce were traded internationally.
This large-scale expansion of international interests took place for two main reasons – power and influence. The old interests and alliances, many of which were remnants of medieval campaigns and royal marriages, were now propelled by commerce and industry. Yet while individual nations aggressively built their own empires, they also related to one another through a variety of trade agreements – reciprocal arrangements that allowed for international communications networks – and ultimately through finance, as the different banks of the world traded wealth.
Annexation and treaties
Not all nations expanded by force. Many absorbed external countries by way of annexation and treaty, usually with the general consensus of leaders, but often over a background of native protest. Colonisation – or the settling in a newly acquired country by the people of the empire, whilst retaining their motherland's culture, laws and values – was a popular method of expansion, but settlements overseas were costly to maintain.
This gave birth to a further method of expanding empire – commercial imperialism, whereby countries were absorbed into the empire and tied with strict trade agreements, yet were able to retain their own governments and laws under certain restrictions. The British Empire used this expansionist technique, overseen by regional governors, to great effect. When combined with a network of supporting colonies in neighbouring lands for security, Britain found that large areas could be controlled at an acceptable cost. Indeed, many of them returned extremely lucrative profits.
Defending the realm
As empires grew, so did their military resources. Most nations had massive reserves of troops, which were trained by programmes of national service. In a similar fashion to the Cold War arms race, nations constructed gargantuan forces of infantry, cavalry and artillery, which could easily be mobilised with only a few weeks' notice. These acted as huge deterrents for any prospective enemy.
Initially, some of these armies were considerably antiquated. The Russian and Austro-Hungarian cavalry units, for example, still wore brightly coloured tunics and metal breastplates, and charged into battle with sabres drawn. Hardly any modernisation had taken place in these armies and the advent of the motor vehicle had been largely ignored as a military machine. Their tactical considerations were always aimed at massive sweeping set pieces, the likes of which would cease shortly after the First World War began.
Only Britain and Germany had made any major changes to their military. Britain held a small professional army, which wore olive coloured battle dress, and even relied on a number of petrol driven trucks and tractors. Germany had their grey-green battle dress, yet still retained their old spiked , albeit under canvas covers, until the familiar M1916 Stahlhelm (the forefather of the well-known Second World War design) was issued.
War plans and timetables
Unlike the Cold War, however, these huge armies of imperial deterrent didn't wOnce the equipping of the nation was started, the took over.
The war could have been stopped had the combatant nations considered diplomacy and arbitration, but, as the momentum gathered for war, it appeared that the empires were destined to clash head-on in the prevailing fever of empire building, pride and arrogance.
Unstoppable forces
Austria-Hungary certainly never expected Russia to intervene when they declared war on Serbia in 1914 (an act they considered a local affair), but the chain reaction that followed caused an imperial war like no other.
Germany mobilised in sympathy with her Austrian cousins, sending her plans into action, which included a sweeping wheel through Belgium into France. On invading Belgium (a neutral country) the British Empire declared war on Germany, and within a matter of months the world was turned upside down by these European powers that held the majority of the world in their hands.
From the trenches of western Europe to the Russian steppe, from the Alpine mountains to the sands of the Near East and Africa, and from the surface to the depths of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, war gripped the world on a previously unknown scale.ork as tools to keep the peace. In a complicated world of alliances and national egos, once mobilised these colossal forces were almost impossible to stop. Each empire naturally held war plans for how to defend against or attack their competitors. These were often constructed in the finest detail, including estimated wear on marching boots and highly elaborate train timetables.

For the people, by the people

Every year, on Remembrance Day – the nearest Sunday to 11 November (the date of the Armistice that ended the First World War in 1918) – the Queen lays a wreath at the Cenotaph in London's Whitehall to commemorate the millions who died in the wars of the 20th century. But as well as this national monument, there are tens of thousands of other war memorials in Britain, built by local communities to remember their own.
About 750,000 British people – many of them teenagers or barely out of their teens – died during the First World War. Most were buried in what the poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) called 'some corner of a foreign field'.So many British soldiers died in France and Belgium that the government couldn't allow the repatriation of their remains. So, at the end of the war, millions of bereaved Britons had no place to go in Britain to express their grief. The consequence of this absence was the largest public arts project the country had ever seen, as British communities erected local war memorials. There are more than 37,000 First World War memorials, and most of them are still visible today. With their figures of attacking soldiers, gun crews, angels and scrolls listing the names of the dead – from all walks of life – they both commemorate the fallen and are works of art whose powerful presence dominates the public spaces of many a town or village.
The best known of these landmarks is the Whitehall Cenotaph – the name means 'empty tomb' in Greek. A temporary cenotaph made of wood and plaster had been erected for the Peace March of 1919, and this was so popular that a permanent structure of Portland Stone was built. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), it was unveiled on 11 November 1920 by King George V, on the same day as the funeral in Westminster Abbey of the Unknown Warrior (at which the remains of an unidentifiable British serviceman, chosen from a number of bodies exhumed from four battle areas – the Aisne, the Somme, Arras and Ypres – were re-buried).We will remember them
All over Britain, local communities raised money to built stone crosses or monuments to remember the sacrifice of thousands. The majority were built and unveiled between 1919 and 1922. If one town or village could not afford its own memorial, two or three villages would club together.
Although these were works of art, they also had a job to do: they were meant to heal, to reunite on a symbolic level the living and the dead who had been torn apart by the conflict. The memorials had many meanings: they conveyed a sense of loss, national pride in victory and they took the place of absent graves.
If some were built by famous artists and designers, such as Lutyens or Eric Gill (in Briantspuddle, Dorset), many more were built by local craftsman. In Burslem, Staffordshire, for example, the designer, sculptor and mason were all local. Many memorials were ornate, but some were much simpler. For example, a number of battlefield crosses – the original grave markers – were brought back to Britain and displayed here.
In St Albans Church, Acton, a tablet was placed underneath a battlefield cross: 'This cross of an unknown warrior was delivered into the charge of the youth of St Albans by the members of the British Legion (Acton branch) Sunday 9 February 1930. So he passed on – and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.'

Drawing on experience

The First World War was so horrific that, after it ended, it was immediately named 'the war to end all wars'. It not only left a scar on the minds of all the young soldiers who survived the experience, but it also deeply affected all the young writers, artists and musicians who worked in the 1920s and 1930s in Edwardian summer
To understand the impact of the First World War on British culture and the arts, you have to look back at what was happening before the war. Before the conflict started in 1914, if you were a teenager – especially an upper-class or middle-class child – you were brought up in the heyday of Empire.
The books you read, the plays you saw, the music you heard, the paintings you looked at and even the clothes you wore all told the same story: British was best. Having an Empire on which 'the sun never set', most Britons basked in a smug glow of superiority and complacency.
In music, a good example of this is the Pomp and Circumstance March Number One, aka 'Land of Hope and Glory', by Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934), first performed in 1902. But the feeling of superiority affected all the arts; it created a British culture that was very traditional, and deeply suspicious of foreign influences.
The result was the domination of the conventional. For example, although H G Wells (1866-1946) was a pioneer of science fiction, he also wrote simple novels about lower-middle-class people. The History of Mr Polly (1910) exemplifies this kind of ordinary realism. The plays of John Galsworthy (1867-1933) might deal with class issues – Strife (1909) is about an industrial strike – but they were boringly naturalistic in form. In art, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) painted conventional portraits of society ladies.
Modernism: shock of the new
If you wanted cultural excitement before the war, you had to go abroad. In Paris, you could find painters such as Pablo Picasso experimenting with Cubism, an early form of abstract art. His Les Demoiselles d'Avignon – a 1907 painting of Parisian prostitutes – was a turning point in the history of modern art. It caused outrage because its images of the women are disfigured and unnatural.
In Paris, you might hear Igor Stravinski's The Rite of Spring (1912), a piece of classical music that caused shock with its use of vigorous dance rhythms. In Milan, the Futurist modern art movement (1909) attacked artistic conventions and celebrated speed, fragmentation and modern machinery. In Vienna, psychiatrist Sigmund Freud rubbed shoulders with philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and writer Arthur Schnitzler. Each of these cities was a centre of modernism.
Modernism was an artistic movement that challenged the complacency of middle-class life by violently attacking conventional stories, plays, painting and music. In each case, the traditional realistic form of the artwork was challenged by the use of new, highly imaginative techniques.
In the novel, instead of telling the story objectively, modernists told it subjectively as a stream of ideas, sometimes disconnected. In painting, instead of showing what a person looked like, painters tried to break up images and produce collage effects. In Picasso's paintings, for example, you can see both profiles of a person's face at the same time. In music, dissonance was more important than harmony. The modernists wanted to make art uncomfortable and to provoke new ideas. Britain. If you grew up after the war, you couldn't escape its shadow.

Fit for heroes?

The impact Britain's wartime Prime Minister David Lloyd George promised the soldiers who had fought 'for King and Country' that they would return to a 'land fit for heroes'. Many did not return at all. Of those who did, most collected their civilian suit, a pair of medals and a small cash payment – then joined the ranks of those looking in vain for work. Others collected a disability pension but were never able to work again.
The land they returned to had changed profoundly, and yet it hardly met any of their great expectations.
Unlike the Boer War 15 years earlier, far away in Africa, the 'Great War' was fought much closer to home. Its ramifications and hardships, and the fears and anxieties it generated, were felt much more directly – particularly by communities on the eastern coast, vulnerable to attack from the sea, and London's city dwellers, enduring indiscriminate terror from enemy air raids.
The large proportion of the population who played a direct role in the war produced a much greater dislocation in the society they left behind. The naïve predictions of politicians, that war 'would be over by Christmas' and that life in Britain would continue to be 'business as usual', were soon dispelled.

The absence of millions of the country's youngest and fittest workers for several years forced Britain to develop innovative ways of meeting the needs of its society. Through that process, people came to understand themselves in new ways. Similarly, those who returned from war carried a different outlook. Some claimed that the experience had 'made' them, others that it had 'destroyed' them; none said that the war had left them unchanged.
An industrial empire
Turn-of-the-20th-century Britain was a cohesive and productive society, even if it tolerated great disparities of wealth. A world economic power, it led the way in industrialisation. Although many people still worked on the land, Britain increasingly imported basic foodstuffs from overseas. Those whose parents and grandparents had laboured on 19th century farms had moved in droves to work in factories, mills and coalmines. There, they created goods for a rapidly expanding home market, as well as servicing a growing system of international trade. Living and working conditions were poor and hours long, but jobs were plentiful.

Edwardian Britain still enjoyed a huge empire. Those whose drudgery oiled the wheels of that empire saw few of its benefits. Nevertheless they identified strongly with it and the notion of 'King and Country'. For the most part, the 'lower orders' believed that their rulers were driven by moral and altruistic motives, and they were prepared to serve them with patriotic devotion.of the First World War on British society

Childhood under fire

The horror of the First World War was all too real for the boys who lied about their age to fight on the front line. But life also changed for the young people at home, many of whom experienced the constant fear of loss and the reality of bombing raids and shortages. They shared the general concern about spies and witnessed the grim news from the battlefront, reported with the new moving pictures in cinemas. The public mood altered forever, and this was reflected in the literature and arts for children and young people during and after the war.
Child soldiers
John Condon was not yet 14 years old when he was killed on the battlefield in Flanders, Belgium, to become one of the youngest casualties of the First World War.
His story is typical of the route many children and young people took to the battlefront. From Waterford City in southern Ireland (then still part of the UK, having been delayed by the First World War), Condon fooled a British Army recruiting officer into believing he was 18 years old. The young recruit was soon training at the army barracks in Clonmel and was then sent to fight.
His family discovered he was serving in Belgium only when the British Army contacted them in the spring of 1915 to say he was missing in action. It was another 10 years before a farmer found Condon's body, and the young boy's remains were buried in Poelcapple cemetery near Ypres.
Condon's story was reported in the Waterford News & Star, but even though he was among the youngest victims of the carnage, the story of this child soldier is by no means unique. In Britain, tens of thousands of teenage boys under the minimum joining-up age of 18 (or 19 for service overseas) enlisted. School life was deeply affected:
'Most of the sixth form was wiped out, year after year. ... They were called up and 80 per cent of them would be killed. I know when I was in the sixth form, I think only about 10 per cent or so of the previous year were still alive, and we thought that was life.' (Quoted in George Robb's published by Palgrave)
This under-age enlisting was encouraged by recruiting sergeants, who were tempted to be careless about checking the truth, thanks to the bonus they received for each person who joined up. Often, teenagers would unwittingly reveal their true age, only to be told by the recruiting sergeant to run round the block to help themselves 'remember' that they were older.
The British were not alone in using child soldiers. All armies in the Great War did the same and many young people were only too keen to go to fight. Many of these young people received little training before being sent into battle.
Young people were also put to work for the war effort in other ways, for example growing extra food on allotments or in their gardens, and collecting cooking fat and scrap metal for the arms factories to use to make explosives and weapons.
During the war, an estimated 250,000 teenage boys who were younger than the legal minimum age for soldiers enlisted in the British Army. Around half of these were killed or wounded, some winning medals for their bravery. In addition, after the war, the government estimated that more than half a million children had ended their school careers early as a result of pressure from the conflict.

Mothers of invention

The First World War was a watershed in everyone's lives, whatever their background, age or gender. Understandably, the story of those four horrific years has been told mainly from the men's perspective, but for every letter from the front to a mother, lover or sister, there was a reply from the women who were urged to 'keep the home fires burning'. Like the men, women wrote poems and books; they kept diaries, made speeches and told their children and grandchildren about their experiences, their losses and their new found independence.
Leading feminist and campaigner for women's suffrage, Millicent Fawcett, said: 'The war revolutionised the industrial position of women – it found them serfs and left them free.' 'Revolutionised' is probably overstating the case, but the choices open to them in 1918 were certainly greater than they had been in 1914.
For and against the war
Expectations were already rising before the war. The campaign for women to have the vote raged in the early years of the century and, by the summer of 1914, over 1,000 suffragettes had been imprisoned for destroying public property. Once the fighting started, though, the suffragette movement split. Some suspended their demands in return for their members being released from prison and because, in the words of Emmeline Pankhurst of the Women's Social and Political Union, 'What would be the good of a vote without a country to vote in?'
Others, though, like Charlotte Despard, leader of the Women's Freedom League, refused to compromise on the struggle for equality for women. As pacifists, they also campaigned for a negotiated peace and refused to take part in the war effort. This view was shared by journalist Evelyn Sharp who, when asked what she did in the war, replied: 'I tried to stop the bloody thing!'At the other end of the spectrum was the Order of the White Feather, founded by Admiral Charles Fitzgerald in August 1914, which encouraged women to give out white feathers to young men who had not joined the army. The pacifist, Fenner Brockway, claimed that he was given so many white feathers that he had enough to make a fan.the extraordinarily powerful description of her life and the loss of the young men who were closest to her, became a pacifist as a result of those experiences.
Most women wanted to do their bit to help the war effort, and a proliferation of new committees and organisations sprang up to enable them to volunteer. Some of them performed vital work, saving and supporting lives. One, the Women's Institute, which is still in existence today, was formed in 1915 to help ensure that the nation was fed.
Some of these initiatives though, quietly disappeared when they encountered the reality of war, or the women themselves were discouraged from participating. Emily Galbraith, a trainee teacher, was so keen to do her bit that she wrote to Lord Kitchener:
'I asked whether he would allow us, because we were capable and could protect our country, to learn to fire a rifle. Shortly after, I received a very nice handwritten letter back from Kitchener and he said he didn't approve of women fighting; it was the men's job to look after the women, but he thanked me very much.'
Between these two extremes stood women like Vera Brittain, who, while writing

Soldiers and civilians

Leaving home
Taking up the Sword of Justice
For the average British citizen, the concept of war at the turn of the century was one of relatively short campaigns wagered against nations who were often no match for the modernised British Army – nations who were being drawn into the empire. So when the United Kingdom declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, an epidemic of mass volunteering swept the land.
At the declaration of war, with communication running at the speed of newspaper print, BBC radio broadcasts and hearsay, knowledge was limited and easily controlled by the state. The reality of total war was not understood by the general population, nor talked about by the services that had witnessed fighting in actions such as the Crimean and Boer wars. Although earlier conflicts were reported in the press, the average man in the street was caught on the tide of empire.
Men eagerly swallowed the propaganda proclaiming that it was their duty to serve. Posters with slogans such as 'Take up the Sword of Justice' and 'Be a man and Enlist Now!' told of the glory to be gained in battle.
From a modern point of view, it appears unusual that millions of men should so eagerly volunteer for the front, with what amounts to a careless gush of bravado backed by feelings of unquestioning patriotism. But, in 1914, the majority of young men had no reason to question the authorities. The reality of life on the front was yet to be witnessed. All their lives they had been fed a diet of imperial prestige and superiority, and, of course, the majority held a firm belief that war would only last for a few months at most. Walking into hell
The opening engagements, which were sweeping and mobile, were followed by the dawn of stagnant attritional trench warfare. For the innocent, chirpy volunteers, the colour had gone and the fanfare had stopped. Many must have experienced a dreadful realisation that they had walked freely into hell.
It should be remembered that, for many, military service would have been their first time away from home, and almost certainly their first time to a foreign land – let alone their first time under fire. Once stationed in the trenches, most would have felt a terrible mixture of homesickness and fear, with little choice but to accept that there was no going back and that the war had to be won.
The tremendous stress placed on individuals of all sides in trench warfare can only be imagined. During every attack, each man was faced with only three possible outcomes: either you died, were maimed, or survived unscathed. Through each encounter, your chances were gambled over and over again, causing unimaginable mental stress.
Of course, aside from the horrors of the 'pushes', the appalling living conditions in the trenches had to be endured and survived. Flooding caused trench foot – a condition where troops found their feet literally rotting on the ends of their legs – and the winter brought with it frostbite. Dysentery, flu, colds, trench fever, lice and rats were constant companions in the filthy conditions, and fear never left most men throughout the ordeal.

The Spartans

The Spartans chronicles the rise and fall of one of the most extreme civilisations the world has ever witnessed – one founded on discipline, sacrifice and frugality, centred on the collective, whose goal was to create the perfect state and the perfect warrior.
Here you will find the edited transcripts of all three programmes in the series and a map of the ancient Greek world, plus information on how you can discover more about the Spartans and their extraordinary way of life.
A nation of fightersWhen we think of ancient Greece, we almost invariably think of Athens. This is where the blueprint for Western civilisation received its first draft. Philosophy and science, art and architecture, democracy itself – all these have their roots there. But there's more to the story of ancient Greece than Athens.
Unlike Athens, Sparta can't boast of its philosophers and politicians and artists. It became famous for two things: its frugality – which is where we get our word 'spartan' from – and its fighters. In everyday Sparta, these two were intimately linked.
The whole of Spartan society conformed to a strict code of extreme discipline and self-sacrifice. Their aim was to create the perfect state protected by the perfect. Although Spartan hard-line ideals don't have the charisma of Athenian culture, they have meant as much to Western civilisation as the ideals represented by the Parthenon. Down the centuries, the Spartans have inspired a diverse range of people. Anyone with a plan for a utopia has cherry-picked their ideas – Plato, Sir Thomas More, the French revolutionaries, American pioneers, Adolf Hitler, even the founders of the English public school system. They all turned directly to the Spartans for ideas and inspiration.
So the story of the Spartans is also, in a way, the story of ourselves. It's the story of how many of the values that we hold dear were first found in a warrior state on the mainland of Greece 2,500 years ago. Early historyThe Spartans' history is highly dramatic – and it has a setting to match: the Peloponnese, a huge peninsula crowned by rugged mountains and scored by deep gorges, which forms the southern-most part of the Greek mainland.
The ancient Greeks thought of it as an island – and seen from the northern side of the Gulf of Corinth, it does have a brooding, closed-in feel, cold-shouldering the outside world.
Long before the Spartans of our story arrived on the scene, this part of the world was making history. Many of the Greeks who fought in the Trojan War more than 3,000 years ago came from here. King Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, came from Mycenae, in the eastern Peloponnese. And to the south, in the city-state of Sparta in the region known as Lakonia, was the palace of Menelaus and his wife Helen – for Helen of Troy, whose beauty caused the Trojan War, had once been Helen of Sparta.
The heroes of the Trojan War, their lavish palaces and possessions, the beauty of Helen – all offered a standard against which the later Spartans would measure their own actions and aspirations.
At some point in about 1200 BC, all this disappeared.
No one knows for sure what happened – earthquakes, tidal waves, slave revolts have all been blamed. But all over the eastern Mediterranean, the world of Helen of Troy disappeared in a cataclysm of fire and destruction. A remnant clung on for a few hundred years, but finally the Dark Ages came to Greece and the thread of history snapped. The new SpartansAt some point in those centuries of darkness, new people came out of the north, seeking more hospitable lands. They were called the Dorians, and they brought with them a new Greek dialect, their sheep and goats and a few simple possessions. They settled all over the Peloponnese, and some found their way to Lakonia and the lands that had once belonged to King Menelaus.
It had been a journey worth making. The people who came to Lakonia must have thought they had found a Shangri-la. The plain of the Eurotas river was, north to south, 50 miles of precious, flat, fertile farmland. And the river ran through it all year round. In land-hungry Greece, where 70% of the land couldn't be farmed and what was left was squeezed between the mountains and the sea, that was a lot of elbow room.
To the west were the spectacular Taygetos mountains, rising to more than 8,000 feet (2,440 metres) in places. Patches of snow still lingered while down on the plain spring was turning into summer. The slopes once teemed with game – deer, hare and wild boar, rich pickings for the new arrivals.
But statistics don't convey the most striking quality of this place: the sense of security. Everywhere you look, you're bounded by hills. The feeling is one of enclosure – not claustrophobia, but safety. You feel that everything you could possibly want is here – if you can just lay claim to it and keep the rest of the world at bay.
And so the herdsmen traded in their sheep for olive trees, and settled down. A new Sparta came into being, and the new Spartans built a temple, the Menelaion, to honour the legendary king and his wayward wife.
In the period of renewal following the Dark Ages, new city-states like Sparta appeared all over Greece. They varied in size and power, but had one thing in common: they were all communities governed according to a set of mutually agreed laws and customs. The rules by which people agreed to live varied, but their aim was broadly the same: to create good order and justice and to protect against chaos and lawlessness. Few cluesIn Sparta today, archaeologists are still piecing together the story of the people who first came here some 3,000 years ago and created an ideal city – a utopia. It's not an easy task because they left relatively few clues behind.
Unlike the Athenians, the Spartans were famous for not building, not making things and, in particular, not writing about themselves. Nearly every account we have of the Spartan way of life was written by an outsider.
Some of these writers resented Sparta's power, some were in awe of its traditions and achievements, and some were given to exaggeration – and there was much about Sparta that lent itself to exaggeration. So of all the cities and civilisations in the ancient world, the Spartans remain the most intriguing and the most mysterious.
Take, for example, Sparta's kings. Since time immemorial, Sparta had been ruled by not one but two kings – two royal houses, two royal lines, twice the potential for the rows and wrangles to which all monarchies are prone. The Spartans explained this unique arrangement by claiming that their kings were direct descendants of the great-great grandsons of Heracles (Hercules), the strongman of Greek myth. According to the legend, it was this pair of twins who wrested control of the Peloponnese from the descendants of King Agamemnon.
The stories that people tell about themselves are always revealing. This tale of a land-grab by a pair of aggressive usurpers, themselves descended from the most macho man in mythology, sent out a worrying message to Sparta's neighbours.

Nelson’s Navy

Winston Churchill, it is said, uttered the immortal phrase: 'Naval tradition? Monstrous! Nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash!’ But by the time he came to reflect on the subject, the reality of life at sea in the late 18th and early 19th century had long passed from human memory. In the intervening years, it had been recreated by a series of graphic first-hand accounts and then distilled into an accepted wisdom by the poet John Masefield in his classic 1905 book Sea Life in Nelson’s Time.
Masefield created a mythic world of cruelty and suffering, where seamen were forcibly impressed into the navy, controlled by corporal and capital punishment, exposed to virulent diseases and served disgusting food, their only solace being the daily issue of grog – watered-down rum. Quite how these men survived, let alone defeated every enemy they faced for more than 200 years, was not a question Masefield troubled himself to pose.
The first requirement for any historical enquiry is to establish context. We live in the early 21st century, two centuries after Trafalgar. We must not impose our modern sensitivities and values on the very different world that our ancestors inhabited.
Peacetime recruitment
In peacetime, the navy recruited all its men as volunteers. Many of them were boys, often helped by charities such as the Marine Society, which funded careers at sea for street boys in major cities. As professional sailors required years to master their craft, it was as well to start early. Boys commonly began at the age of 10 or 12, and there was plenty of work for small, nimble seafarers, both on deck and in the rigging.
By 16, most boys would be competent seamen, able to work aloft, reef sails, knot and splice ropes and steer the ship. At the same time, their bodies took on a characteristic broad-shouldered, barrel-chested physique – the result of heavy hauling and lifting and often being bent double over the yards – while the constant roll of the ship gave them a peculiar rolling gait.
Teamwork
On board, the sailors were divided into watches, usually two, which shared the work, and into messes of 8 to 10 individuals, for catering. Each mess was a self-assembled group of like-minded men, usually with the same skills and rank. They shared the domestic chores of preparing food, collecting cooked dishes and washing up. These small groups formed the core of shipboard life and were the basis of effective teamwork, working together in key areas, perhaps in the rigging or as a gun crew.
Most sailors worked at sea for another decade, taking ‘shore side’, or coastal seafaring, work when they settled down in their late 20s. A small proportion remained at sea, filling vital specialist roles such as master, responsible for the navigation of the ship.
Mature sailors were a valuable commodity, the pinnacle of working-class labour in the 18th century, better paid and better treated than any shore-bound contemporaries. Their status was most obvious in wartime, when the navy needed three or four times as many seamen as in peacetime.
Impressment
During war, sailors could earn far more serving in merchant ships, which could increase pay to attract them. Naval pay remained constant, but the state had a legal right to the services of mariners in wartime. This allowed the navy to ‘impress’ trained sailors from merchant ships or the shore – that is, compel them to serve. While many men volunteered in wartime, taking an enlistment bounty, these were landsmen, untrained, inexperienced fellows who might make a sailor – in time.
While impressment was often portrayed as cruel and unjust – for instance, the infamous ‘pressgangs’ – it was the only method that allowed the state to man the fleet quickly and thereby ensure that the enemy could not invade. Even if a few non-seafarers were occasionally impressed, the majority were eventually released. Most men who were taken and kept then ‘volunteered’ to earn the bonus.
The evils of the system were acceptable to the society of the time. They ceased to be so in the 19th century, but in the 20th, nations relied on conscription to fill the ranks of their armed forces, a system no different in concept and far less discriminating in practice.
Dress and adornments
Sailors’ clothes were completely practical, except for the outfits they donned for going ashore. Sailors at work wore long trousers that could be rolled up, short-waisted jackets that kept the body warm without the tails of a contemporary coat, and heavy knitted ‘jerseys’. These clothes were either supplied by the ship, or made from raw materials that the men purchased on board. Most worked barefoot, for extra grip on the ropes while aloft.
By contrast, they acquired elaborate colourful clothes for going ashore, rich with silver and gold ornaments. After the exertions, dramas and terrors of the sea, they took their pay to the nearest seaport, spending freely on wine, women and song. For most people, this was their only sight of the sailor – a larger-than-life, exotic figure, usually drunk and apparently carefree. However, the same men, once afloat, were transformed into skilled professionals.
Contact with Polynesian societies in the South Pacific introduced a new form of personal adornment to the seafarer’s repertoire: the tattoo. Officers and men alike had returned from Cook’s first voyage with intricate patterns embellishing their bodies. While the gentleman scientist Sir Joseph Banks had his discretely applied to his buttocks, the sailors were more interested in display. Such devices together with their weather-beaten faces and hands scarred by rope work and ingrained with tar, made the sailor instantly recognisable ashore, easy prey for the pressgang.
Punishment
Nothing about 18th- and early 19th-century life at sea is as profoundly shocking to the modern sensibility as the systematic use of physical punishment. Dark tales of brutal floggings administered with sinister ‘cat o’ nine tails’ and hanging from the yardarm have frightened the unthinking for generations.
In truth, society at this time was rough and brutal, with almost all crimes being punishable by some form of physical chastisement. The navy had no better system than the rest of society, and nowhere to imprison offenders. Instead, they were flogged and returned to duty, their punishment being witnessed by all. The crew was assembled on the upper deck to watch the event, with the marines drawn up with loaded muskets between sailors and officers. This was the theatre of example, intended to inspire others.
Most punishable offences at sea concerned the safety of the ship and the discipline of the crew. Men were punished for refusing orders, falling asleep on watch, being too drunk to work or failing to keep themselves and their clothes clean. The number of lashes administered tended to reflect the severity of the offence and the sailor’s previous record. Thieves were punished by the crew themselves, who made them run the gauntlet.
Mutiny – the attempt to seize control of a ship – was rare, but earned those involved the ultimate punishment: hanging. However, hangings were very rare, because sailors were too scarce and too valuable to be wasted.
Drink
The main cause of indiscipline was drink. Men smuggled alcohol on to the ship or shared their grog rations to render themselves insensible. If this behaviour threatened the safety of the ship or affected the discipline of the crew, the offenders earned a beating.
While consuming eight pints of beer and a significant quantity of rum-and-water daily might seem like a recipe for disaster, the men were accustomed to the intake and, given their strenuous work regime, burnt off most of the alcohol. Men occupied in demanding physical employment ashore were also used to a significant beer ration.
Sailors’ wives
The Victorians decided that women had no place on board warships and, with customary zeal, actively wrote them out of the history of the 18th-century navy. However, a significant number of women did go to sea, although they never appeared officially on crew lists.
Usually they were the wives of petty officers – older women who were unlikely to excite the passions of the younger sailors. They often acted as nurses, but at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, several women served in the ammunition-handling parties, one was killed, yet another gave birth.
By the early 19th century, fashion was changing and many ships went to sea without women. By the 1840s, they had been removed altogether, unless we count the occasional presence of the captain’s wife.
There were also women seafarers, working on small family-run coastal vessels. In addition, a handful of women served at sea disguised as men, but such cross-dressing was frowned upon by almost everyone.
Homosexuality
In their anxiety to sanitise 18th-century seafaring life, the Victorians managed to confuse the offence of ‘unclean behaviour’ – such obnoxious activities as relieving oneself in the hold or on deck or refusing to wash one’s clothes or body – with something they feared: widespread homosexuality among an essentially all-male crew.
In reality, homosexual behaviour was disapproved of by crews, and documented cases are rare. Great care was taken to protect adolescents from older crewmen. Contemporary society considered homosexuality a mortal sin, while the law held it to be a crime punishable by death. Navies have always reflected the societies from which they spring, and in this respect, the 18th-century royal navy was hardly unique in punishing overt homosexuality.
Relatively few cases came before naval courts martial, but those found guilty were hanged. It seems that, in the essentially public nature of life on board these crowded, cramped warships, the accepted mores of the age and the threat of serious punishment sustained the social order.
Sexual outlets
The reverse side of the strictures against homosexual activity was the remarkable licence given to the crew to indulge their heterosexual desires.
Although opportunities for heterosexual activity were severely restricted on board ship, few vessels spent more than a month or two at sea without returning to port. Once there, wise captains found outlets for the obvious desires of a large body of young, unattached heterosexual males. In peacetime, shore leave was granted, allowing the men to enter the exotic, dangerous and costly nightlife of the large seaports, where wine, women and song were available – at a price.
In wartime, when the fear of desertion and the shortage of men made captains unwilling to allow their crews to go ashore, they allowed the shore to come out to the ship. All manner of women, money-lenders, small traders and other interested parties would come aboard. While one or two of the women would have been the wives of sailors on the ship, others might have been someone’s wife, but for that day, they were anyone’s for a consideration. The adage that sailors have a wife in every port had some basis in fact: a sailor would always claim that the object of his desire was his ‘wife’, to salve the conscience of the naval authorities.
Once this floating society had assembled, a sensible captain gave the ship over to the crew for the day. It was no place for the sensitive or the indiscreet. The old saying ‘show a leg’ attests to the fact. When it was time for the ship to leave, the cry would go out: ‘Show a leg!’ (now often corrupted to ‘Shake a leg’). By inspecting the proffered limbs emerging from the men’s bunks or hammocks, the petty officers could find out how many women were on board and ensure that all of them left the ship before it sailed.
Disease, medicine and prevention
A consequence of casual sex was, as one might expect, a significant incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. These formed a substantial part of the workload of naval surgeons. Treatment was primitive: usually an injection of mercury into the affected part. And the patient would also have to pay for it, as contracting such a disease was considered a self-inflicted injury.
Even in wartime, disease killed far more men than battle or the accidents of the ocean. The great killers were scurvy, a wasting disease caused by lack of vitamin C, and dysentery, while malaria and yellow fever made service in the tropics unusually hazardous. As medical knowledge improved, the dangers of disease were reduced. For instance, a workable solution to scurvy – the issue of lemon juice – was available by the 1790s, when the royal navy faced its greatest task: waging a 22-year war of attrition with republican/imperial France.
One reason why Nelson won his battles was because his men were healthier than those of Spain and France. The royal navy’s mania for cleanliness held back contagion, and it fed its crews better than their shore-side contemporaries, fuelling their labour with a calorie-rich mix of meat, alcohol and hard bread, with as much fruit and vegetable matter as contemporary food preservation and local supplies allowed. Nelson’s own obsession with keeping his men healthy meant that he devoted massive efforts to procuring lemons, fresh vegetables and meat, because he knew it was easier to keep them fit than to cure the sick.
Surgery
As Nelson knew better than anyone, many of the injuries caused by enemy action and by falls from the rigging required surgical treatment. He claimed to have been wounded almost 100 times in the king’s service, and never forgot the first bite of the surgeon’s cold scalpel in 1797 as his shattered arm was amputated.
With no understanding of antiseptic conditions and no anaesthetic beyond copious draughts of rum, the survival rate for major surgery was low. Fractured limbs could be amputated, but serious penetrative internal injuries were invariably fatal. Physicians who treated the interior of the body were less commonly found on board ship, being members of a more prestigious profession than the surgeons who were only just beginning to shed their association with barbers.
At least the surgeons had plenty of practice. At Trafalgar in 1805, William Beattie not only tended to the dying Nelson, but had 145 other wounded men to treat. He worked in horrific conditions deep in the bowels of the ship, far from the action, in a dimly lit, low-ceilinged space usually home to the midshipmen. The Reverend Alexander Scott, who stayed by Nelson’s side until he died, never forgot the experience, suffering recurrent nightmares for the rest of his life.
Professionalism and commitment
While ‘rum, sodomy and the lash’ might be the accepted stereotype of life at sea in the 18th-century royal navy, it is far from the reality. The royal navy was, and remains, the most successful fighting service in world history, successful in almost every battle it fought and invariably on the winning side in war. It achieved this unrivalled success by treating its men well.
Churchill was wrong: the traditions of the royal navy were supreme professionalism and a commitment to victory, built on a community that worked hard and was allowed occasional licence to indulge their passions. One hopes that, long before he became prime minister in 1940 and needed the navy as never before, Churchill had learned that lesson.

Education Department

Acting Deputy Secretary of Education Gene Hickok introduced the History Channel youth-oriented documentary Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: The Making of a Dream today at Kettering Middle School in Maryland. Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, History Channel Vice President of Historical Programming Susan Werbe and Kettering Middle School Principal Legaunt J. Jones joined Hickok for this special preview.
"We are proud to partner with the History Channel to bring history alive for millions of people," Hickok said. "We want all of our students to understand the meaning of our civic holidays and not that they are just a day off from school."
The cooperative venture between the department and the History Channel will help make students more aware of the importance of our national holidays. The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. documentary is one of a series that will also include programs on Labor Day and Veterans Day.
"This series will clearly show that our holidays offer a chance to look at the values that inspired our nation -- values like honesty, hard work, equal justice for all, dedication, compassion, concern for others and sacrifice," Hickok said. "Dr. King's struggle for equality and inclusion is consistent with the No Child Left Behind law in that it promises a quality education for all children because education is a civil right."
The 30-minute documentary will be aired nationally on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Monday, on the History Channel at 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. (ET/PT). The film includes interviews with Rep. Harold Ford, Dule Hill of The West Wing, and U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige.

Why the History Channel Had to Apologize for the Documentary that Blamed LBJ for JFK's Murder

The History Channel recently observed the fortieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination with a series of films, "The Men who Killed Kennedy." The most widely-viewed hour, "The Guilty Men," cast Lyndon Baines Johnson in a starring role for ordering the assassination. The film was offered without fear, and without evidence.
LBJ's family and friends heatedly protested the program. Finally, after former President Gerald Ford weighed in with his objections, the History Channel engaged several of us to evaluate the program, and provided air time to discuss our findings and conclusions. Let us hope that is not the end of the matter.
The Kennedy assassination has been fertile, enduring territory for conspiracy theories. But if such elaborate notions are your cup of tea, put no hope in the scurrilous book by Barr McClellan, a onetime associate who worked in Johnson's personal attorney's office, and British film maker Nigel Turner's farcical film rendering of McClellan's musings, which the History Channel broadcast. Their work is a parody of assassination theories and beliefs; surely, this is history as a joke the living play on the dead. Such programs reflect our desperate desire to embrace a conspiracy rather than the crucial question of truth.
McClellan's wild charges involve characters across the political spectrum, from disgruntled Texas oilmen, to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the CIA, the military, Johnson's crooked Texas cronies, and Texas Governor John Connally -- forget he almost was killed himself. The Right has to be pleased with the mugging of LBJ, while the Left can pin more evil-doing on Hoover. A perfect storm. Such are our faded memories that McClellan can afford to omit a Communist plot.
McClellan's background is worth a mention. He is a convicted forger, who then resigned from the bar before disbarment proceedings ran their course. His certitude knows no bounds: "LBJ murdered John F.
Kennedy"; Johnson "knew of the assassination"; and he was involved "beyond a reasonable doubt." His "evidence" rests entirely on the alleged utterances of dead people, with the sole exception of that poster child for a con artist, Billie Sol Estes. A McClellan supporter wrote to me, urging that I call Estes to "get the truth." He said "Billie Sol Estes was there when LBJ ordered the killings, 18 of them in all. This includes JFK. Don't take my word for it, get it from the man who was there at the time the killings were ordered. Call Billie Sol Estes, . . ." The FBI has investigated Estes's accusations, and they found his credibility "non-existent." A further cover-up? Then consider how this pitiful figure admitted to his sentencing judge in 1979: "I have a problem. I live in a dream world." In a rare sensible moment, the film maker wisely did without his services -- but not without his fabrications.
Assassination conspiracy theories and books expounding them proliferate. But film is special. A conjurer's sleight-of-hand and verbal misdirection are ready ingredients for manipulating a mass audience. Richard Condon, who wrote The Manchurian Candidate, and who managed to spoof every recent American president, gave his own comic twist in Winter Kills, a novel (later a film) naming the perp as Patriarch Joseph Kennedy, distressed because his son had become too liberal. A comic genius, Condon never labeled his work as anything other than fiction. But Oliver Stone, in the new tradition of "docu-dramas,"gave us JFK, which lent an aura of authenticity to Jim Garrison's outlandish, gothic tale. Sadly, many of those under 25 believed him.
The History Channel film takes historical revisionism to unimagined depths. It seems everyone wanted Kennedy dead: he was going to withdraw from Vietnam in December 1963, so the CIA and the military wanted him out of the way; Texans wanted to preserve their oil-depletion allowance; J. Edgar Hoover believed Kennedy was about to replace him; and driving it all, of course, was Lyndon Johnson's insatiable appetite for power. Increasing the improbability of the thesis, it seems, heightens its appeal.
History is essential to our understanding of ourselves. Interpretations inevitably will vary. We will tinker with its meaning, but there are bounds to the truth of essential facts. Our profit-driven world drives such blatant exploitation of the past. Several years ago, a journalist, using John Mitchell and Gordon Liddy as his principal sources, peddled a "new, different" explanation for Watergate: John Dean organized the break-in, allegedly to protect his wife's reputation. Dean successfully sued for libel, but the truly appalling event was the media's uncritical reception and praise for the work. After all, we already had tapes in which Nixon acknowledged his criminal action. The damage to the Deans was calculable; for history, that may be another matter.
The History Channel is a brand name. The network has a responsibility to produce history, not fiction, or what McClellan brazenly labels, "faction." Did anyone at the company watch this film and invoke the elementary rules for historical writing: is it true, and what is the evidence? McClellan's forgery conviction is not a very useful credential for writing history.
History is our treasure, under assault from plagiarists and trivializers. Hearsay, gossip, and innuendo are not the stuff of history. History should be informative, entertaining, and above all, it must rest on a foundation of credible and verifiable evidence. We must not deliberately falsify it. We have Hollywood for that.
What is at stake here is the public rendering of our history. The commercial exploitation of the past predictably raises the bottom line. For the History Channel, as with any other such venture, ratings and the broadest possible appeal are the surest way to swelling profits. Inevitably, truth is the first casualty. Imagine, we speak of an entertainment or arts "industry." Our homogenized culture is reduced to as simple formula: does it entertain and will it sell?
But we are talking history now. Certainly, we can strive to make it as broadly appealing and interesting as possible. But does that mean we cloak it with unsubstantiated rumors and imagining, or invented sources? History is not created and rendered with the props of falsehood, innuendo, or manipulation. History is bordered by the wall of facts; without them, we are in the realm of fiction.
The History Channel has made a start in the right direction as it has totally disavowed the program and publicly promised it never will be shown again. It always is free to sell it as a hitherto-unknown episode of "The Twilight Zone."

The History of Christmas

The Christmas most people believe is traditional — the Victorian Christmas of Charles Dickens' time — bears little resemblance to Christmas past.
During the Middle Ages and into the early period of modern Europe, Christmas was a peasant celebration filled with hedonism, drinking, carnality and social inversion. It was even banned in an effort to curb decadence. The British Parliament abolished religious festivals, including Christmas, in 1647 and the Puritans of New England outlawed Christmas between 1659 and 1681. People caught celebrating were fined five shillings.
December 25 was set aside to mark the birth of Jesus Christ. However, looking back at how Christmas was observed and shaped, the Nativity played a minor role in Christmas' present form. What is more, the date chosen as Christ's birthday was arbitrary, but not illogical. It was not until the fourth century that church authorities selected December 25 to celebrate Christ's Mass. There is no historical or biblical reason to place the birth of Jesus Christ on this day. Scholars have suggested a spring birth was more likely because Saint Luke talks of shepherds watching their flocks when Christ was born. This only happens in the spring during lambing time.
It is commonly believed the aim of Christmas was to replace and absorb popular non-Christian festivals. Saturnalia, the most popular Roman festival in republic times began on December 17 to honour Saturn, the god of agriculture. Continued until January 1, it was filled with feasts, games and normal social order was turned upside down. More threatening to Christianity was the pagan Mithras, or sun, cult. On December 25, winter solstice, the birth of the sun god was celebrated. Mithraism was declared the religion of the Roman state in 274.
After the declaration of Christmas, a melding of traditions and rituals ensued, but by the 17th century Christmas was more commonly celebrated with its pagan traditions, not as a feast for Christ's Mass. Activities included mumming (a practice still found in Newfoundland that involves performance acting and dressing in disguise) and wassailing (a type of social inversion where the lower classes would invade wealthy homes and demand gifts).
The growth of cities and high unemployment in the early 19th century lead to gang riots during the Christmas period. Believing social order was being threatened a group of New Yorkers, who became known as the Knickerbockers, aimed to reinvent Christmas. Members included Clement Moore, author of the renowned poem penned in 1822 that begins, " 'Twas the night before Christmas," and Washington Irving who wrote The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, in 1819, stories about the celebration of Christmas in an English manor.
Christmas was successfully moved from the unruly streets to the familial order of the home, transforming the holiday from a class-based ritual of demanding gifts from the elites, to a family centered giving of gifts by parents to children. This upholds the Christian tradition of giving presents to children to commemorate the gifts given by the three wise men to baby Jesus, but is also inline with the modern value of the nuclear family. The modern conception of Christmas was greatly influenced by Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, written in 1843. Although, in reality this Victorian ideal never existed, many credit the story for focusing Christmas on sentimentality, family and charity and for the popularity of Christmas today. It was not until the 1880s that Christmas became the primary holiday in North America.

Life in the 18th-century royal navy

Winston Churchill, it is said, uttered the immortal phrase: 'Naval tradition? Monstrous! Nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash!’ But by the time he came to reflect on the subject, the reality of life at sea in the late 18th and early 19th century had long passed from human memory. In the intervening years, it had been recreated by a series of graphic first-hand accounts and then distilled into an accepted wisdom by the poet John Masefield in his classic 1905 book Sea Life in Nelson’s Time.
Masefield created a mythic world of cruelty and suffering, where seamen were forcibly impressed into the navy, controlled by corporal and capital punishment, exposed to virulent diseases and served disgusting food, their only solace being the daily issue of grog – watered-down rum. Quite how these men survived, let alone defeated every enemy they faced for more than 200 years, was not a question Masefield troubled himself to pose.
The first requirement for any historical enquiry is to establish context. We live in the early 21st century, two centuries after Trafalgar. We must not impose our modern sensitivities and values on the very different world that our ancestors inhabited.
Peacetime recruitment
In peacetime, the navy recruited all its men as volunteers. Many of them were boys, often helped by charities such as the Marine Society, which funded careers at sea for street boys in major cities. As professional sailors required years to master their craft, it was as well to start early. Boys commonly began at the age of 10 or 12, and there was plenty of work for small, nimble seafarers, both on deck and in the rigging.
By 16, most boys would be competent seamen, able to work aloft, reef sails, knot and splice ropes and steer the ship. At the same time, their bodies took on a characteristic broad-shouldered, barrel-chested physique – the result of heavy hauling and lifting and often being bent double over the yards – while the constant roll of the ship gave them a peculiar rolling gait.
Teamwork
On board, the sailors were divided into watches, usually two, which shared the work, and into messes of 8 to 10 individuals, for catering. Each mess was a self-assembled group of like-minded men, usually with the same skills and rank. They shared the domestic chores of preparing food, collecting cooked dishes and washing up. These small groups formed the core of shipboard life and were the basis of effective teamwork, working together in key areas, perhaps in the rigging or as a gun crew.
Most sailors worked at sea for another decade, taking ‘shore side’, or coastal seafaring, work when they settled down in their late 20s. A small proportion remained at sea, filling vital specialist roles such as master, responsible for the navigation of the ship.
Mature sailors were a valuable commodity, the pinnacle of working-class labour in the 18th century, better paid and better treated than any shore-bound contemporaries. Their status was most obvious in wartime, when the navy needed three or four times as many seamen as in peacetime.
Impressment
During war, sailors could earn far more serving in merchant ships, which could increase pay to attract them. Naval pay remained constant, but the state had a legal right to the services of mariners in wartime. This allowed the navy to ‘impress’ trained sailors from merchant ships or the shore – that is, compel them to serve. While many men volunteered in wartime, taking an enlistment bounty, these were landsmen, untrained, inexperienced fellows who might make a sailor – in time.
While impressment was often portrayed as cruel and unjust – for instance, the infamous ‘pressgangs’ – it was the only method that allowed the state to man the fleet quickly and thereby ensure that the enemy could not invade. Even if a few non-seafarers were occasionally impressed, the majority were eventually released. Most men who were taken and kept then ‘volunteered’ to earn the bonus.
The evils of the system were acceptable to the society of the time. They ceased to be so in the 19th century, but in the 20th, nations relied on conscription to fill the ranks of their armed forces, a system no different in concept and far less discriminating in practice.
Dress and adornments
Sailors’ clothes were completely practical, except for the outfits they donned for going ashore. Sailors at work wore long trousers that could be rolled up, short-waisted jackets that kept the body warm without the tails of a contemporary coat, and heavy knitted ‘jerseys’. These clothes were either supplied by the ship, or made from raw materials that the men purchased on board. Most worked barefoot, for extra grip on the ropes while aloft.
By contrast, they acquired elaborate colourful clothes for going ashore, rich with silver and gold ornaments. After the exertions, dramas and terrors of the sea, they took their pay to the nearest seaport, spending freely on wine, women and song. For most people, this was their only sight of the sailor – a larger-than-life, exotic figure, usually drunk and apparently carefree. However, the same men, once afloat, were transformed into skilled professionals.
Contact with Polynesian societies in the South Pacific introduced a new form of personal adornment to the seafarer’s repertoire: the tattoo. Officers and men alike had returned from Cook’s first voyage with intricate patterns embellishing their bodies. While the gentleman scientist Sir Joseph Banks had his discretely applied to his buttocks, the sailors were more interested in display. Such devices together with their weather-beaten faces and hands scarred by rope work and ingrained with tar, made the sailor instantly recognisable ashore, easy prey for the pressgang.
Punishment
Nothing about 18th- and early 19th-century life at sea is as profoundly shocking to the modern sensibility as the systematic use of physical punishment. Dark tales of brutal floggings administered with sinister ‘cat o’ nine tails’ and hanging from the yardarm have frightened the unthinking for generations.
In truth, society at this time was rough and brutal, with almost all crimes being punishable by some form of physical chastisement. The navy had no better system than the rest of society, and nowhere to imprison offenders. Instead, they were flogged and returned to duty, their punishment being witnessed by all. The crew was assembled on the upper deck to watch the event, with the marines drawn up with loaded muskets between sailors and officers. This was the theatre of example, intended to inspire others.
Most punishable offences at sea concerned the safety of the ship and the discipline of the crew. Men were punished for refusing orders, falling asleep on watch, being too drunk to work or failing to keep themselves and their clothes clean. The number of lashes administered tended to reflect the severity of the offence and the sailor’s previous record. Thieves were punished by the crew themselves, who made them run the gauntlet.
Mutiny – the attempt to seize control of a ship – was rare, but earned those involved the ultimate punishment: hanging. However, hangings were very rare, because sailors were too scarce and too valuable to be wasted.
Drink
The main cause of indiscipline was drink. Men smuggled alcohol on to the ship or shared their grog rations to render themselves insensible. If this behaviour threatened the safety of the ship or affected the discipline of the crew, the offenders earned a beating.
While consuming eight pints of beer and a significant quantity of rum-and-water daily might seem like a recipe for disaster, the men were accustomed to the intake and, given their strenuous work regime, burnt off most of the alcohol. Men occupied in demanding physical employment ashore were also used to a significant beer ration.
Sailors’ wives
The Victorians decided that women had no place on board warships and, with customary zeal, actively wrote them out of the history of the 18th-century navy. However, a significant number of women did go to sea, although they never appeared officially on crew lists.
Usually they were the wives of petty officers – older women who were unlikely to excite the passions of the younger sailors. They often acted as nurses, but at the Battle of the Nile in 1798, several women served in the ammunition-handling parties, one was killed, yet another gave birth.
By the early 19th century, fashion was changing and many ships went to sea without women. By the 1840s, they had been removed altogether, unless we count the occasional presence of the captain’s wife.
There were also women seafarers, working on small family-run coastal vessels. In addition, a handful of women served at sea disguised as men, but such cross-dressing was frowned upon by almost everyone.
Homosexuality
In their anxiety to sanitise 18th-century seafaring life, the Victorians managed to confuse the offence of ‘unclean behaviour’ – such obnoxious activities as relieving oneself in the hold or on deck or refusing to wash one’s clothes or body – with something they feared: widespread homosexuality among an essentially all-male crew.
In reality, homosexual behaviour was disapproved of by crews, and documented cases are rare. Great care was taken to protect adolescents from older crewmen. Contemporary society considered homosexuality a mortal sin, while the law held it to be a crime punishable by death. Navies have always reflected the societies from which they spring, and in this respect, the 18th-century royal navy was hardly unique in punishing overt homosexuality.
Relatively few cases came before naval courts martial, but those found guilty were hanged. It seems that, in the essentially public nature of life on board these crowded, cramped warships, the accepted mores of the age and the threat of serious punishment sustained the social order.
Sexual outlets
The reverse side of the strictures against homosexual activity was the remarkable licence given to the crew to indulge their heterosexual desires.
Although opportunities for heterosexual activity were severely restricted on board ship, few vessels spent more than a month or two at sea without returning to port. Once there, wise captains found outlets for the obvious desires of a large body of young, unattached heterosexual males. In peacetime, shore leave was granted, allowing the men to enter the exotic, dangerous and costly nightlife of the large seaports, where wine, women and song were available – at a price.
In wartime, when the fear of desertion and the shortage of men made captains unwilling to allow their crews to go ashore, they allowed the shore to come out to the ship. All manner of women, money-lenders, small traders and other interested parties would come aboard. While one or two of the women would have been the wives of sailors on the ship, others might have been someone’s wife, but for that day, they were anyone’s for a consideration. The adage that sailors have a wife in every port had some basis in fact: a sailor would always claim that the object of his desire was his ‘wife’, to salve the conscience of the naval authorities.
Once this floating society had assembled, a sensible captain gave the ship over to the crew for the day. It was no place for the sensitive or the indiscreet. The old saying ‘show a leg’ attests to the fact. When it was time for the ship to leave, the cry would go out: ‘Show a leg!’ (now often corrupted to ‘Shake a leg’). By inspecting the proffered limbs emerging from the men’s bunks or hammocks, the petty officers could find out how many women were on board and ensure that all of them left the ship before it sailed.
Disease, medicine and prevention
A consequence of casual sex was, as one might expect, a significant incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. These formed a substantial part of the workload of naval surgeons. Treatment was primitive: usually an injection of mercury into the affected part. And the patient would also have to pay for it, as contracting such a disease was considered a self-inflicted injury.
Even in wartime, disease killed far more men than battle or the accidents of the ocean. The great killers were scurvy, a wasting disease caused by lack of vitamin C, and dysentery, while malaria and yellow fever made service in the tropics unusually hazardous. As medical knowledge improved, the dangers of disease were reduced. For instance, a workable solution to scurvy – the issue of lemon juice – was available by the 1790s, when the royal navy faced its greatest task: waging a 22-year war of attrition with republican/imperial France.
One reason why Nelson won his battles was because his men were healthier than those of Spain and France. The royal navy’s mania for cleanliness held back contagion, and it fed its crews better than their shore-side contemporaries, fuelling their labour with a calorie-rich mix of meat, alcohol and hard bread, with as much fruit and vegetable matter as contemporary food preservation and local supplies allowed. Nelson’s own obsession with keeping his men healthy meant that he devoted massive efforts to procuring lemons, fresh vegetables and meat, because he knew it was easier to keep them fit than to cure the sick.
Surgery
As Nelson knew better than anyone, many of the injuries caused by enemy action and by falls from the rigging required surgical treatment. He claimed to have been wounded almost 100 times in the king’s service, and never forgot the first bite of the surgeon’s cold scalpel in 1797 as his shattered arm was amputated.
With no understanding of antiseptic conditions and no anaesthetic beyond copious draughts of rum, the survival rate for major surgery was low. Fractured limbs could be amputated, but serious penetrative internal injuries were invariably fatal. Physicians who treated the interior of the body were less commonly found on board ship, being members of a more prestigious profession than the surgeons who were only just beginning to shed their association with barbers.
At least the surgeons had plenty of practice. At Trafalgar in 1805, William Beattie not only tended to the dying Nelson, but had 145 other wounded men to treat. He worked in horrific conditions deep in the bowels of the ship, far from the action, in a dimly lit, low-ceilinged space usually home to the midshipmen. The Reverend Alexander Scott, who stayed by Nelson’s side until he died, never forgot the experience, suffering recurrent nightmares for the rest of his life.
Professionalism and commitment
While ‘rum, sodomy and the lash’ might be the accepted stereotype of life at sea in the 18th-century royal navy, it is far from the reality. The royal navy was, and remains, the most successful fighting service in world history, successful in almost every battle it fought and invariably on the winning side in war. It achieved this unrivalled success by treating its men well.
Churchill was wrong: the traditions of the royal navy were supreme professionalism and a commitment to victory, built on a community that worked hard and was allowed occasional licence to indulge their passions. One hopes that, long before he became prime minister in 1940 and needed the navy as never before, Churchill had learned that lesson.