Category Archives: History

Arts, Books, History

History Books of the Year

LITERARY REVIEWS

The Siege by Ben Macintyre (published by Viking, 400pp)

FOR six long days in the spring of 1980, the world held its breath after armed dissidents opposed to the Ayatollah Khomeini seized the Iranian embassy in London, holding 26 people hostage, among them a British policeman on duty at the door and two members of the BBC who were there to get visas.

It was a turning point, an event that broke entirely new ground. Not only was it the first time that Middle East terrorism reared its head in the West – an unwelcome chapter that is still far from finished – it was also the premier performance of Britian’s elite military soldiers, who took the embassy, gun-toting figures in black balaclavas storming it on live, prime-time television.

Most of the public had never heard of these Special Forces or Regiment before; afterwards, they were – and still are – a legend.

Ben Macintyre tells the inside story with his customary pace and panache, the tension mounting as the minutes ticked away and the terrorists threatened to murder their hostages, but also not shying away from the moral nuances of the finale in which all but one of the perpetrators died.

Macintyre’s account draws on contemporary diaries and interviews with witnesses. The Ministry of Defence cleared former special forces soldiers to speak to him. He writes: “Most of the source material is secret, pseudonymous, or privately owned.” With some justification, this has been described as “the last word on the subject”.

Queen Victoria and her Prime Ministers by Anne Somerset (Published by William Collins, 576pp)

A MONARCH reigns but does not rule – that is the unique and eccentric nature of the British constitution.

And the restrictions placed on her ability to get her own way frequently enraged Queen Victoria.

In public, her prime ministers queued up to praise her “thorough understanding” (Gladstone’s phrase) of her constitutional position, but they, of all people, knew first hand how indignant she became on being reminded of who really ran the country.

Theoretically, she had immense power – to disband the army, declare war, pardon all convicted offenders, and to dismiss the civil service. Wisely, she chose not to risk a revolution by exercising these rights, but that didn’t mean she was politically inactive. Behind the scenes, she made her presence, her views and, above all, her displeasure known to the various men – ten in all over 64 years – who headed her governments.

Her meddling led to Gladstone to whisper behind her back that she was “an imperious despot”.

The feeling was mutual. She couldn’t stand him and complained he was humourless, and unable to take a joke.

But according to Anne Somerset, Queen Victoria made an important impact through her “uncanny ability to align herself with public opinion, instinctively espousing views that coincided with those of many of her subjects”, even though her day-to-day life in palaces and country houses was far removed from theirs.

The common sense of the stout little widow in a black bonnet – drawing on what she called her “desire to do what is fit and right” – was crucial in steering the nation away from the sort of popular unrest and extremism that after her death would overtake other European countries.

Takeover: Hitler’s Rise to Power by Timothy W. Ryback (Published by Headline, 416pp)

At the back end of 1932, it was common currency among the politically aware in the Weimar Republic that the man they sneered at as the “Bavarian corporal” was a busted flush, along with his Nazi Party and its uniformed stormtroopers.

They’d failed to get anywhere near a majority in recent elections to the Reichstag, with two-thirds of German voters rejecting them and their share of the popular vote falling.

A cartoon on the front page of a national newspaper had Adolf Hitler slouching against a table holding a broken swastika in his hand like a child moping over a broken toy.

And just weeks later, at the end of January 1933, that same Adolf Hitler was all-powerful, reluctantly appointed Chancellor of Germany by the ageing President von Hindenburg.

Twice in the past, Hindenburg had sent Hitler away empty-handed, refusing to elevate the would-be dictator. This time, caught in a constitutional deadlock of rival parties, none of whom had majority backing, he gave in submissively. 

How Hitler combined foot-stamping intransigence with adept political manoeuvring (i.e. lies and broken promises) to reach his objective is forensically examined by US historian Timothy Ryback. What comes across is how close the Führer came to failing and possibly sparing the world all the horrors that followed.

Instead, the complacency of his multiple enemies, pursuing their own interests instead of combining to keep him out, gave Hitler his opportunity.

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Arts, Books, Britain, First World War, History

Book Review: The Unknown Warrior

LITERARY REVIEW

THERE are some things that to all intents and purposes are impossible to reconcile. Nothing illustrates that more perfectly than the tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey where war and closure are signified for all to see.

Alongside the graves of several monarchs lies the remains of an unidentified serviceman killed in the First World War.

More than one million British Empire soldiers were killed during the conflict and over half a million of them have no known grave.

The casket of the unknown warrior, lowered in place in the autumn of 1920, held a “somebody who was nobody to represent all the missing”, writes the historian and former RAF officer John Nichol.

Tracing the events of history, Nichol attempts to describe the reality of life in the trenches.

“The place stank of death,” wrote Anthony French, a young soldier in the Civil Service Rifles. Trenches were cleaved through corpses. “From the one side of one there hung a hand and a forearm.” Vivid and graphic literature that explains incisively as things were.

An account of French’s friendship with his comrade Bert Bradley brings home the unbearably touching narrative.

Bradley – a generous, witty, pipe-smoking man with a fine tenor voice – was killed during an offensive. “I saw Bert pause queerly in his stride and fall stiffly on his side and slither helplessly into a hole,” recalled French. Bert’s body was never recovered.

At the heart of this story is the extraordinary figure of a Church of England clergyman from Kent, Reverend David Railton.

At the beginning of the war, Mr Railton left his parish in Folkestone to become a military padre, serving on the Western Front, where he won a Military Cross for saving three men under fire. While attempting to give solace to men about to die, he conceived the idea for the Unknown Warrior.

Former airman Nichol chronicles the warrior’s repatriation like a bank heist in reverse: a crew of crack experts – ministers, clergy, undertakers, army and naval officers – worked together to put the valuables into a vault. Secrecy about the chosen body was paramount in order that, as the Dean of Westminster noted, any mourner “be encouraged to imagine that it is her own sacred dead upon whom this great honour has been bestowed”.

Yet the body also had to be “sufficiently identifiable to ensure that the King and the British people were not interring a blown-up French civilian or, perish the thought, a German, by mistake”. Four unidentified bodies were exhumed from the key battle areas of Aisne, Somme, Arras, and Ypres. One was chosen at random and brought back with barrels of French soil to cover his coffin. Nichol also talks to wives who lost husbands more recently in the Falkland Islands and Afghanistan, and draws on his own experience as a RAF navigator during the Gulf War. He very nearly joined the sombre roll-call himself when his Tornado fighter jet was shot down and he was captured, tortured, and paraded on television around the world by Iraqi forces.

Nichol’s writing style is as engaging as it is erudite. He is forensic in his research but never dispassionate, keeping his interest firmly fixed on the human story.

At the state funeral on November 11, 1920, the second anniversary of the end of the war, the tone was one of unity in grief and sorrow, rather than military pomp. Westminster Abbey filled up with mourners, including relatives of the lost – mothers, fathers, wives, and children. Not everyone could be included: 20,000 applications were received for just 1,600 spaces.

One 12-year-old wrote to the authorities pleading to be let in, declaring: “The man in the coffin might be my daddy.”

In the Abbey, one group stood out in the ranks of the bereaved, notes Nichol: “A pitiful band of 99 mothers distinguished by an almost unfathomable depth of loss. They had been selected for seats of honour because each one had lost her husband and all her sons.”

– The Unknown Warrior by John Nichol is published by Simon & Schuster, 400pp

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Government, History, Intelligence, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Technology

Hezbollah’s indignant fury

MIDDLE EAST

THE terrifying attacks this week on thousands of pagers operated by Hezbollah across Lebanon is being perceived as the Pearl Harbour of the 21st century.

When the Japanese Navy Air Service bombed Pearl Harbour in 1941, their aim was to knock out America’s air power in the Pacific and prevent the US from joining the Second World War.

But, as history shows, they achieved precisely the opposite. Roused to indignant anger, the American public were instantly committed to the Allied cause – and Japan found itself facing a new and mighty enemy.

The operation carried out against Hezbollah and the Lebanese was spectacular on its own merits (despite the wickedness of the attacks) – with at least nine fatalities and more than 3,000 seriously injured.

Yet its wider significance is certain to resonate in the months and years to come.

If Israel, like Imperial Japan before it, thought this massive attack would serve to dissuade Hezbollah’s fighters from entering a full-scale war with the Jewish state, many should fear they will be disappointed.

Already the Islamists will be plotting their revenge – and Israeli PM Benyamin Netanyahu has been locked in talks at his defence ministry’s HQ in Tel Aviv over how to respond to a potential escalation.

Critically, however, many will be asking how did Israel actually achieve this?

There are several competing theories. The Israelis could have planted old-fashioned booby traps in the thousands of pagers – which are said to have been delivered to Hezbollah fighters only in recent days.

More likely, is that the pagers were pre-loaded with a sophisticated computer virus that caused them to deliberately overheat, resulting in their lithium batteries catching fire.

This is a known risk of the batteries used in many electronic devices – and is part of the reason why airlines refuse to let passengers carry laptops in their checked luggage.

In whatever way Israel carried out the operation, it’s ironic that Hezbollah’s militants only recently swapped mobile phones for pagers in the belief that they were more secure.

Famously, mobiles carry GPS software that allows the devices – and therefore their users – to be tracked anywhere in the world.

A few weeks ago, Hamas’s political chief Ismail Haniyeh was hunted to a guesthouse in the Iranian capital of Tehran – and eliminated. Experts believe his assassination was possible only because his phone was being tracked.

The truth is that Israel excels at precisely this kind of warfare. Decades of facing down hostile neighbours that vastly outnumber its own citizens has led to the embattled Middle East developing a fearsome array of sophisticated military tools, from nuclear missiles and tanks to cyber-weapons.

Combined with this is the ruthlessness of its famed secret intelligence agency, Mossad, in tracking down and eliminating its enemies, from the perpetrators of the Munich Olympics massacre onwards. As we have seen, Mossad always gets its man – or men – in the end.

So, what comes next? If reports are right, and one in 30 of Hezbollah’s fighters have indeed been put out of action due to the pager attack, that will present a severe impediment to the group’s operational capability. The leadership will also be asking questions about how to communicate securely with its fighters in future.

With Hezbollah’s military organisation disrupted, the Israelis might decide to invade a portion of southern Lebanon to create a “buffer zone” that could protect civilians in northern Israel from rocket attacks.

Some experts will have concerns about this “contained” approach. For all the brutal ingeniousness of the pager attack, the consequences for regional security could be dire.

Instead, the pager operation is far more likely to be the prelude to another all-out Israel-Lebanon War – with grim consequences for world peace and stability.

Hezbollah’s allies, Iran and Syria, will inevitably be anxious and worried that Israeli intelligence could do the same to them. But even those Arab countries with diplomatic relations with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, must now be asking themselves how safe they really are – and whether or not their communication networks are secure. This will weaken Israel’s ability to build friendships in the region.

And there could be consequences for us, too. Western democracies will already be assessing what this novel form of warfare means for them – and how they might be able to copy Israel’s methods.

History teaches us that no new military technique remains a monopoly of its inventor for long. How long before Putin or Xi Jinping works out how to make millions of iPhones around the world burst into flames in the pockets of their foes?

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