Military surprise and the environment Richard Essberger, MA (Cantab), FRGS Abstract Surprise is a phenomenon that can have startling effects on individuals, politics, commerce and science. The focus, however, is on military surprise, which is differentiated from military shock. The types, causes and categories of military surprise are also shown, in the context of the land battle, where surprise occurs in a majority of tactical actions, progressively more so at the operational level and, at the strategic level, nine out of ten wars start with surprise. It acts as a force multiplier, increases the probability of success, and reduces the surpriser’s casualties. Battlefield surprise is usually caused by the combatants, but can be generated by terrain and weather factors, including, inter alia, difficult terrain, direction, gradient, avalanches, earthquakes, dust, heat haze, fire, water, flooding, ice, mud, the seashore, mist, snow, wind, the sun, and weather forecasting. Analysis of 120 historical battles where environmental factors led to surprise being found that in a majority of cases those factors were manmade, and many of the reminder were in any event planned for and exploited by military commanders. Antidotes to military surprise are briefly considered. Definition ‘Military surprise is among the greatest dangers a country can face’, these are the opening words of one of the best of the few books on the subject of surprise (Bells, 1982). If that is true of the strategic, or national, level to which the statement applies it is equally valid of the operational or tactical levels that concern most commanders. What is perhaps less obvious is that surprise can be caused not just by the enemy, but by other factors such as the environment itself. Figure 1 – A model of surprise The author’s interest in military surprise originated in work conducted as a historical consultant to the Defence Operational Analysis Centre in the United Kingdom, using historical data from armour, antitank, and infantry actions at the tactical level to assess military surprise. It should be noted, however, that the views which follow are those of the author and not those of the Ministry of Defence.
Transcript
Military surprise and the environment Richard Essberger, MA (Cantab), FRGS
Abstract Surprise is a phenomenon that can have startling effects on individuals, politics, commerce and science. The focus, however, is on military surprise, which is differentiated from military shock. The types, causes and categories of military surprise are also shown, in the context of the land battle, where surprise occurs in a majority of tactical actions, progressively more so at the operational level and, at the strategic level, nine out of ten wars start with surprise. It acts as a force multiplier, increases the probability of success, and reduces the surpriser’s casualties. Battlefield surprise is usually caused by the combatants, but can be generated by terrain and weather factors, including, inter alia, difficult terrain, direction, gradient, avalanches, earthquakes, dust, heat haze, fire, water, flooding, ice, mud, the seashore, mist, snow, wind, the sun, and weather forecasting. Analysis of 120 historical battles where environmental factors led to surprise being found that in a majority of cases those factors were manmade, and many of the reminder were in any event planned for and exploited by military commanders. Antidotes to military surprise are briefly considered.
Definition
‘Military surprise is among the greatest dangers a country can face’, these are the opening words of one of the best of the few books on the subject of surprise (Bells, 1982). If that is true of the strategic, or national, level to which the statement applies it is equally valid of the operational or tactical levels that concern most commanders. What is perhaps less obvious is that surprise can be caused not just by the enemy, but by other factors such as the environment itself.
Figure 1 – A model of surprise
The author’s interest in military surprise originated in work conducted as a historical consultant to the Defence Operational Analysis Centre in the United Kingdom, using historical data from armour, anti-‐tank, and infantry actions at the tactical level to assess military surprise. It should be noted, however, that the views which follow are those of the author and not those of the Ministry of Defence.
Surprise is a common but little researched phenomenon that we see all about us in our lives, in political and financial circles, and, most precisely, on the battlefield. Its principal definition in the dictionary is, ‘Catching of person(s) unprepared’, but it is important to note that it is by no means necessary that the event be unforeseen, merely that it be unprepared for, so that, to take an extreme case, were Christians to be surprised at the Second Coming it would not be because the event was unforeseen – even newspapers used to call the largest typefaces ‘Second Coming’ fonts – but because they had ignored the very possibility. Secondly, it is important, in the military context, to distinguish surprise from shock, and although the two sometimes act in concert on the battlefield, they are by no means indistinguishable. Once again to the dictionary, which gives shock as ‘Violent collision, concussion or impact’, instancing mass cavalry action, and stressing the suddenness and violence of the event; secondly it refers to a sudden and disturbing mental impression and, thirdly, to a great disturbance of an organisation or system. The first case may be thought of in military terms as ‘impact shock’, the second as ‘battle shock’ and the latter as ‘command shock’, but in all three cases the effect is distinct from that brought about by surprise. One might characterise the difference in these terms, the ‘surprisee’ can not take action, whilst the ‘shockee’ does not.
When it really sets to work, surprise, rather like the Kobe earthquake, creates havoc in its wake, toppling both weak and well-‐engineered structures, exposing weak political leadership, and consigning expensive investments to the rubbish bins of financial history. As with an earthquake, surprise appears to work most effectively in systems which are rigid and hierarchical, so that decision-‐making processes geared to rapid and efficient transmission of information and orders provide the ideal means through which the effects of surprise can operate. These features are, of course, exemplified in military command structures, but the surprise effect can be found operating in every aspect of society, as can be seen in the ‘wire diagram’ of surprise, Figure 1. An individual might encounter surprise any day, be it in the unlooked for confrontation with a burglar, the accident with a car that ‘appears from nowhere’, or the sudden break-‐up of a marriage. Political surprises are just as frequent, at the national level a Conservative party in government which finds itself reduced overnight to a rump of only two seats – an historical example (from Canada’s general election of 1993), of course, rather than a prediction. In international politics examples come thick and fast. In 1978 an American President praised the Shah of Iran’s regime as ‘an island of stability’; a year later the Shah had fallen. The collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was equally unexpected and terminal. Financial or commercial surprise can be almost as startling, the withdrawal of Sterling from the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) came ‘out of the blue’, although the jury remains out as to whether this was true of the recent collapse of Barings. The surprise can also take longer to take effect -‐ as Unilever found out when it suffered its greatest ever marketing setback and wrote off £57 million concerning Persil Power. When political and financial surprise accompany military surprise then the effects can be devastating. In September 1973 the Japanese Prime Minister said that an energy crisis might come within ten years ... ten days later the Yom Kippur War erupted, quickly followed by the oil price shock and world economic recession.
In the military, surprise has historically been the rule rather than the exception, of such importance that Major General J F C Fuller wrote, ‘he [who] wishes to understand war, must examine the nature of surprise in its thousand and one forms as it pursues its relentless course through history’ (Fuller, 1926). A pre-‐eminent example of surprise is Operation Overlord, in June 1944, when the German High Command had wagered so heavily on Pas de Calais, that they lost their shirts when an outsider, Normandy Beaches, came through to win. In this case, surprise was present in all its forms – directional, technical, timings, size, et al – which together with a skilfully laid trail of deception and a fortuitous degree of self-‐delusion on Hitler’s part combined to create an effect lasting for days or even weeks after the invasion itself. Surprise is such a commonplace in war that commanders who choose to ignore it, who choose instead to accept the accepted wisdom or who plan on re-‐fighting their army’s last battle, are almost certainly heading for defeat.
Surprise in maritime and aerial warfare
The Royal Navy does not have a recognizable doctrine at the operational level, but in special forces operations, submarine warfare, and amphibious landings, if nowhere else, it values surprise as highly as any service. Russian naval doctrine’s ‘battle for the first salvo’ is recognizably surprise by another name, as is the United States Navy’s concept of so-‐called ‘anticipatory self-‐defence’.
In aerial warfare surprise is regarded as an innate characteristic of the air weapon, a point reinforced by the introduction of stealth aircraft.
While surprise is a principle of war to all three services it is in land warfare that it is most frequently applied, and is central to success. However, the published material on the subject focuses almost exclusively on start-‐of-‐war
surprise, rather than operational or tactical surprise, or on surprise in the peacetime and peacekeeping operations on which the West is so dangerously fixated.
Surprise in the land battle
So what are the causes of surprise in the land battle? Most commonly, as might be expected, surprise is caused by the enemy or, occasionally, by ‘friendly forces’, However, in the words of a Polish writer, ‘Human activity is not necessarily the cause of surprise. It can also be generated by the forces of nature, earthquake, flood, etc.’ (Kuleszynski, 1970). Environmental causes conveniently group themselves under the headings of terrain and weather, two of the five ‘fundamental factors’ of war given by the Chinese military philosopher, Sun Tzu, the other three being politics, doctrine and the commander.
How often does surprise occur on the battlefield? In a study of 228 battles from twenty wars between 1914 and 1974, the American analyst, Barton Whaley, found 93 of these were at the strategic level, defined in this instance as the initial attacks of a war, the initial attacks to open offensives on a new front, or new attacks on existing but dormant fronts (Sherwin 1982). Of these, 93% contained an element of surprise. Other studies suggest that in battles at the operational level the comparable figure is approaching 60%, while the author’s studies of surprise (Essberger, 1989-‐1990) and anti-‐armour weapons (Essberger, 1992-‐1994) in 335 actions at the tactical level 52% contained surprise (Figure 2).
Since surprise occurs in a majority of battles military commanders should therefore expect to be surprised on the battlefield, but does it contribute to success? Further analysis of Barton Whaley’s database found that 90% of surprise attacks were successful, as again only 50% without surprise. Other studies suggest that surprise often has a force multiplier effect of more than two, as well as significantly reducing the casualties suffered by the surpriser – the Gulf War land assault saw massive surprise associated with low losses; in comparison, Russia’s much foreshadowed assault on Grozny suffered heavy casualties.
The ways in which surprise affects the land battle are generally agreed to fall into five categories, although the nomenclature varies between commentators,
When: this could be the season, date or time of an operation; as in the unseasonable attack launched by the Russians against the Japanese occupying Manchuria in 1945, the joint Egyptian/Syrian attack on Israel’s Yom Kipur, or the fighting at Sidi Rezegh in the Libyan desert, where a German panzer battalion stumbled across the night time leaguer of HQ 4th Armoured Brigade and the 8th Hussars armoured regiment, and encountered no opposition when it launched an immediate attack, taking virtually the entire force prisoner.
Where: the location or direction of an operation; one of the principal categories of environmental surprise, and instances are referred to below. They include the fall of Constantinople in 1453 because of an unguarded gateway, the D-‐Day landings, General MacArthur’s landings at Inchon in the Korean War, and the battle in the Sinai for Abu Agheila during the 1967 Arab-‐Israeli War.
What: the strength or quality of the force; the capability of forces frequently come as a surprise, whether it be the unlooked for division which suddenly concentrates and attacks on a brigade frontage, or the unexpected performance of an underestimated enemy. The Greeks put up an unexpectedly tough resistance to the numerically superior Italian attack in 1940, as did the Italians fighting in the mountain battles at Keren in Eritrea, while the Germans were astonished by the Australians when they first encountered them at Tobruk.
How: the tactics or doctrine employed; examples include the German tactic of advancing anti-‐tank guns in amongst tanks in the desert, the German employment of glider troops to attack the Belgian fort at Eben Emael in Belgium (in itself a novel tactic, but reinforced by their being equipped with beehive type hollow shaped-‐charge explosives, a matter of technical surprise), or Nelson’s tactics at Trafalgar, which were a departure from the accepted norms of the Royal Navy. Blitzkrieg, combining concentrated armour and close air support, came as a massive doctrinal surprise, as Brigadier Mackenzie points out, ‘long anticipated by Fuller and Liddell Hart, it still came as a surprise because those in authority had not heeded their message’, (Mackenzie, 1988).
With: the technical surprise of new weapons or equipment; the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, the use of Mulberry harbours to overcome the absence of port facilities in Normandy, or the widespread use by the Israelis of Remotely Piloted Vehicles (RPVs) for reconnaissance purposes.
Tactical 52% – Operational 60% – Strategic 93%
Figure 2 – Frequency of military surprise at different levels
In summary, British Army doctrine stresses that surprise in warfare decisively shifts the balance of combat power against the commander who suffers it. ‘It is not essential that the enemy is taken unawares, but only that he becomes aware too late to react effectively’ (MOD, 1989).
Surprise and the environment
To examine the relationship between military surprise and the environment some 120 battles containing elements of both were assessed, drawn roughly equally from four periods: firstly, ancient and mediaeval warfare to the Wars of the Roses; secondly, from 1500 to Waterloo; thirdly, post-‐Waterloo to 1939; and lastly, the Second World War to the present. The examples below, and the brief analysis which follows, have been taken from those battles.
It has been said that difficult terrain, like fire and water, makes, ‘a good servant, but a bad master’ (L’Estrange, 1692). Some commanders sleep soundly in their beds because their force lies behind ‘impassable’ ground or is deep in ‘impenetrable’ jungle. Such phrases should make you take a firmer grip on your rifle and then go out to check on the sentries, for the history of warfare is littered with battles lost because of directional surprise, from the pass at Thermophylae, to Singapore, where the guns so notoriously pointed in the wrong direction. Photographs of these guns released in November 1941 by the Ministry of Information were accompanied by this statement, ‘Singapore’s Big Guns Ready to Roar! The striking power of Singapore Island has been formidably reinforced in recent months and a concentration of heavy artillery is now ready there for any eventuality. The big guns ring the island strategically and command all the seaward entrances.’ It just goes to show that you can’t believe everything you read in the papers.
It was Frederick the Great who said, ‘wherever a man can set his foot, an army may follow’ (May, 1909), and great commanders think of difficult terrain as a challenge as opposed to an impossibility. So, to Alexander, the Hindu Kush was no obstacle, nor were the Alps to Hannibal.
In 1552 Morice, Elector of Saxony, was advancing on Innsbruck through an Alpine pass guarded by the supposedly impregnable castle of Ehrenberg. A local shepherd told him of a mountain goat track which led to the rear of the fortress which he had stumbled across while searching for a straying sheep. Morice immediately sent a small force along this track while his main body demonstrated in front of the castle. When all were in position he launched a frontal assault that was stoutly resisted by the defenders, until the rumour spread amongst them that the enemy had got in ‘through the back door.’ Suddenly panic took hold and the garrison surrendered. Morice had captured the strongest fortress in the Tyrol almost without bloodshed.
200 years later the Austrians made the mistake of fighting Frederick the Great at Leuthen. This was his favourite area for peacetime manoeuvres, rather as if an invader of the British Isles had chosen to fight the British army on Salisbury Plain. Frederick left a small force in front of the Austrian lines but sent his main army five miles to the south, concealed behind a line of wooded hills. They then attacked the Austrian left flank, and rolled up their line from south to north.
Throughout the North African war the Allied and Axis armies rarely ventured inland from a 50 km wide coastal strip, yet the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) routinely operated deep in the Libyan sand seas. Later, at El Alamein, most soldiers considered their battlefield as being defined to the north by the Mediterranean and, to the south, by the ‘impassable’ Qattara Depression. But to the LRDG the Depression was just another route by which to outflank the Germans. In the 1967 Six Day War the Israelis also played on the myth that sand seas are ‘uncrossable’ in order to surprise Egyptian forces deep in the Sinai. They sent a brigade of Centurion tanks along the Wadi Hareidin, a wadi used only by Bedouin which runs through high sand dunes 25 kilometres south of the Mediterranean coast. The Israeli tanks were able to ambush two Egyptian brigades 50 kilometres inside what they had thought of as friendly territory.
Amongst the most difficult of all ground is steep terrain. It often gives a false sense of security and can lull defenders into dropping their guard. At Quebec, General Wolfe was able to seize the city simply because the French had overlooked the narrow route up the Heights of Abraham that his Highlanders climbed on their hand and knees. Two centuries later, in the 1967 Arab-‐Israeli War, Israeli tanks astonished the Syrians by attacking up the Golan Heights, whose western escarpment rises 500 m in steep hills and sheer cliffs from the valley below. One commentator wrote, ‘Standing in the Jordan valley and looking up at the Golan Heights, you are obliged to bend back your head and stretch your neck. In many places they stand up like a wall’ (Teveth, 1969). To this natural obstacle the Syrians had added formidable defences, and they were not alone in believing that the Golan was ‘impregnable’; a British wartime ‘going’ map of Palestine shows even the lower and gentler Israeli slopes as being impassable to tanks. Yet, in reality, many tanks can climb gradients of over 50%, and Brigadier Peter Young, the British military commentator who visited the area before the 1967 war, wrote, ‘the boulder-‐strewn slopes leading up to the Syrian position were, in fact, quite tankable’ (Young, 1967).
One little noticed aspect of steep terrain, what might be termed ‘Elevation surprise’, materialised during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. As an Egyptian armoured brigade attempted to break out of the Suez Canal bridgehead it drove eastward into the Wadi Mab’ouk, which runs into the Sinai Peninsular just to the south of Suez City. Near the Gulf of Suez this wadi is shallow, but where it crosses the north-‐south road on which the Egyptians intended to emerge, deep in the rear of the Israeli defences, its walls are more than 30 metres high. Advancing along the wadi floor the Egyptian T54/55 tanks were surprised and then destroyed by fire from Israeli M 60A1 Patton tanks on high vantage points. In the valley bottom the T55’s were unable to find slopes which would enable them to elevate their guns to engage the Pattons above them, whereas the M60’s on the jebel slopes could readily depress their guns to engage the T55s. This terrain effect was multiplied because the tank guns of Russian tanks have a smaller range of depression and elevation than those of American tanks. Being schooled on the steppes of Mother Russia, where it is said that if you stand on a chair on the outskirts of Moscow, you’ll see nothing for 800 kilometres – its army is inexperienced in mountainous terrain, and describes as ‘mountains’ what the British Army refers to as ‘hills’. Their problem of inadequate gun elevation has come back to haunt them in Grozny, where their tanks have been quite unsuitable for engaging snipers and RPG 7 teams in high-‐rise apartment blocks.
Few ‘environmental’ phenomena are more dramatic than avalanches, and they are used as military ploys in many films, even in a musical, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Battlefield examples are rarer, although during Hannibal’s advance on Rome, the avalanches and land-‐slides set off by the local tribes forced Hannibal and his celebrated elephants to take a more northerly route across the Alps than had been planned.
If avalanches are the most dramatic of environmental phenomena then earthquakes are the most surprising, they come with no warning and are, usually, a new and terrifying experience to their victims. Predicting earthquakes is clearly an imprecise science – on BBC television news on the day of the Kobe earthquake, the Japanese Charge d’Affaires said, ‘We are playing a cat and mouse game with nature, and are doing whatever humanly can be done. But that doesn’t preclude us from being caught by surprise’. If the prediction of earthquakes remains unreliable then the ability to initiate and control them for military purposes is even less developed. Yet this has not prevented the subject from having received serious attention from some nations, and President Shevardnazde went public in accusing Russia of supporting the Abkhaz break-‐away movement from Georgia partly in order to save an earthquake generation research station near Sukhumi, while the Egyptians have alleged that Israel has been conducting experiments. Even were the technique to be perfected several questions remain to be answered, could ‘battlefield earthquakes’ be initiated with a guarantee that damage would be limited to the enemy; and how, in any event, could they be used outside the world’s known earthquake belts? It is difficult to envisage the answers to these questions, but, in the context of discussing environmental surprises, it would be foolhardy to dismiss the issue out of hand. It is also as well to recall that one such belt runs along the Jordan Valley, amongst the politically and militarily most volatile places on earth, where conflict, when it erupts, is all the more likely
to come as a major surprise because a ‘peace process’ will put the parties off their guard. Is it a coincidence that one of the oldest tales of military surprise, the fall of the walls of Jericho, has sometimes been attributed to seismic activity? Similarly, the parting of the Red Sea has been called, ‘The most famous example of military environmental modification ... for which’ the writer goes on to say, ‘the geological structure and accumulated crustal stress in the Red Sea graben makes this a good potential location, if God is on your side’ (Roots, 1992).
From terrain to dust, in 500 BC there was a dust storm so violent that it overwhelmed and destroyed a Persian army of 20,000 men in the Egyptian desert near Siwa. More usually, however, dust or sandstorms reduce battlefield visibility, sometimes in desert storms which can last for hours or even days. They are fed by the desert’s vast reservoirs of dust, to which military activity contributes by breaking the surface crust. After the Gulf War concern was shown about the long-‐term effect on the desert, although there is little evidence to support these worries. The short-‐term effect, in contrast, is certainly dramatic, as was demonstrated by the scientific analysis of dust storms conducted east of El Alamein by F W Oliver between and 1939 and 1946 (Oliver, 1946, 1947). The level of military activity was reflected in the frequency and intensity of dust storms; in the vegetation year 1939 the number was four, and as the fighting increased so did the number of dust storms, to eight in 1940 and 40 in 1941, reaching a maximum of 51 in 1942. In 1943 it fell to 20, increasing to 26 in 1944, an increase attributed by Oliver to post-‐fighting recovery and battlefield clearance, but dropping back to the pre-‐war level of four in both 1945 and 1946.
In May 1942 Rommel assaulted the Gazala Line, west of Tobruk, sending his 90th Light Division on a wide sweep into the desert to the south. They were accompanied by aero engines mounted on trucks, acting as fans to stir up a dust storm suggestive of armour on the southern flank. In the event, however, this deception made little impression on the command structure of Eight Army, which was already in a state of near collapse. Perhaps the greater impact on the British war effort was made near El Adem, where the Germans found and destroyed a dump containing the entire NAAFI supply of whisky. Rommel’s offensive took him into the area south of Tobruk which came to be known as the Cauldron, and there followed some of the most intensive and confused fighting seen in North Africa. This fighting probably contributed to the dust storm which then developed and continued to blow for several days, described by some as the greatest such storm of the desert war. Without warning, tanks and guns would emerge from massive, swirling clouds of dust, dramatically altering the course of a battle. In one such running fight 5th Royal Tank Regiment was tempted into pursuing German tanks as they withdrew through a great wall of dust. But, once through the dust, most of the British tanks were knocked out when they ran onto a line of dug-‐in anti-‐tank guns.
Twelve months earlier it had been heat haze rather than dust that had reduced visibility. During an assault on the Halfaya Pass in Egypt, a British tank squadron was knocked out by 88 mm Flak guns in the anti-‐tank role. This was a case of total technical surprise, since at this date the British army was unaware that these highly effective guns could be used in the anti-‐tank role. The surprise was all the greater as these guns had been dug-‐in so deeply that their barrels lay flush with the walls of their sangars. This camouflaging effect was enhanced by the early morning heat haze just above the ground, which, at a range of 50 metres, made the guns almost indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain.
From heat to fire, one of the earliest weapons known to man, valuable not only for its destructive effects but also for the fear and panic that its creates. The Roman general, Scipio, made a cunning use of fire in North Africa when faced by the twin armies of Carthage and Numidia. Lulling his opponents into a false sense of security with offers of peace – which seems to be a sure sign that conflict is just around the corner – Scipio sent his legions by night against the two enemy camps, which lay a mile apart. The Numidian force was ill-‐disciplined, its widely dispersed lines consisting of huts constructed from highly flammable reeds. When some of the outlying huts were set ablaze such panic and confusion arose inside the perimeter that the Romans were able to slip into the centre of the camp and wreak havoc. In the other camp the Cathaginian force, seeing what they thought to be an accidental blaze, opened their gates and poured out to the rescue. Outside, secretly lying in wait, Scipio’s second legion was able to gain entry through the open gates without resistance, resulting in the defeat of both enemy forces.
From fire to water, something which the military has usually had too little of, rather than too much – the despoiling of water supplies being as old as military history itself. But water has also been used as a weapon, by elements as diverse as the Dambusters and the Parisian police. One of the more spectacular uses, however, was in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the Egyptians employed water jets to blast through the Israeli sand ramparts of the Bar-‐Lev Line alongside the Suez Canal. Not only were they using the principle of surprise against Israel, its past master, but they were also turning the environment against itself, taking water from the canal to wash away the sand, yet the sand had originally been dredged from the self-‐same canal. It is reminiscent of the children’s game of ‘paper, scissors, and stone’
Overmuch water leads to flooding, and deliberate flooding for defensive purposes is most closely associated with Holland, much of which lies below the level of the North Sea, and its onetime inlet, the Zuyderzee. Since this low lying land is kept free of water by artificial means, by reversing the process – turning off the pumps, opening sluices and cutting dykes – it will naturally flood, and inundations have been a key part of Dutch defence planning from as early as 1574 until the 1930’s. But it was in 1672 that they were used to the greatest extent when, in the face of a French invasion, most of the northern part of Holland was flooded, forming a moat known as the Dutch Water Line around Amsterdam. This was ‘environmental modification’ with a vengeance, and the peasantry whose farms were affected vigorously resisted the army as it attempted to open sluices and cut the dykes. The French, however, had paid no heed to this Dutch tactic and found themselves surprised by the Water Line. They neither appreciated the technical importance of the sluices, nor attempted to gather intelligence on their locations and, in consequence, when a French cavalry raid temporarily seized some important sluices, the raiding partly failed to use the opportunity to drain a large part of the Water Line.
One man-‐made flood has the dubious honour of being history’s most costly human act, in terms of lives lost. In 1938, during the 2nd Sino-‐Japanese War, the Chinese dynamited a dyke of the Yellow River. This halted the Japanese advance and drowned thousands of Japanese soldiers, but the flood waters also devastated millions of acres of crops and topsoil, and flooded three provinces, eleven cities and more than 4,000 villages. Nearly one million Chinese were killed and millions more made homeless, and not until 1947 was the river brought under control again. Military surprise gained at such a cost to a nation is expensive indeed.
Even without man’s assistance rivers can rise suddenly and without warning, and a flash flood in the 2nd World War almost halted the Allied advance up the Adriatic coast of Italy. The Allies had seized the port of Termoli in a surprise amphibious landing, at a time when the Germans had no operational troops on the Adriatic coast. Believing that this surprise factor gave a major advantage to the 78th Infantry Division, its Bailey bridging equipment had been removed by the planners of 8th Army for use in the rear area. In consequence, the infantry brigades struggled to get their infantry across the Biferno River, let alone their supporting tanks and artillery. These were still south of the river when the German responded more quickly than the Allies had believed possible; they had rushed their 16th Panzer Division across from the west coast of Italy into an immediate and ferocious counter-‐attack. At the same time eighteen hours of torrential rains, forecast for a month later, forced the Biferno to rise in spate, sweeping away the only bridge and making the river impassable. Cut off to the north of the river, the unsupported infantry had the fight of their lives to avoid being overrun by the panzer division. In this battle there were three elements of surprise, firstly the British surprise gained by landing at Termoli, and secondly the German surprise achieved by the rapid intervention of the panzer division. These cancelled each other out, but the third surprise, the environmental surprise of unseasonably heavy rains, came close to defeating the Allied offensive.
If land can turn to water by flooding, so water can be transformed into land when the sea freezes over. The Baltic countries are the most experienced in this form of warfare, a fact well described by Lindgren and Neumann (Lindgren, 1982). But even these countries have been surprised on several occasions by attacks launched across frozen seas, and this is probably because the weather conditions have only rarely been cold enough to freeze seawater to a sufficient depth to support the weight of men and animals. If attacks of this nature occur only at intervals of many decades, or even centuries, then the experience of such an assault is lost and the next occasion remains unlooked for. In 1657 the Swedish army of Charles X had conquered the Jutland peninsular, and isolated the Danish government and army in Copenhagen. Then, for the first time in living memory, the sea channels between Jutland and Copenhagen froze over, leaving the Danes convinced that this ice would pin the Swedish down in Jutland. In Charles’s view, however, the ice offered a bridge to the Danish capital, setting an example as a military commander who confronted the environment rather than bowing to it. He set out across the Little Belt with his army of 10,000 men, horses, artillery and baggage sledges. The ice-‐cover on this channel was so thin that two squadrons of cavalry disappeared through it. The crossing of the Great Belt, further to the east, was even more dangerous, because the passage of so many horses had reduced the top two feet of the ice to slush, and many of the baggage sledges plunged through the patches of thinner ice. Throughout their crossing of the ice the Swedish troops were terrified that at any moment they were about to stumble into the open sea, but this daring crossing struck even greater fear into the Danes, who sued for peace as the Swedish army approached Copenhagen.
One of the most improbable episodes of military history occurred near Texel, the Dutch island lying between the North Sea and the Zuyderzee. In the severe winter of 1795 all the waterways of Holland iced over, and the Dutch high seas fleet became frozen-‐in near Texel. Pinchegru’s force of French cavalry and horse artillery was despatched to prevent the fleet from getting clear and sailing for England. The cavalry rode across the frozen Zuyderzee and surrounded the 14 ships.
So astonished were the naval commanders at the prospect of being charged by cavalry, a form of attack they had never anticipated, that their ships surrendered without resistance.
The dividend from attacking over ice can be enormous, largely because of the surprise factor, but if the ice fails then the surprise rebounds on the attacker, usually with fatal consequences. In 1672 this happened, when the French sent the Duke of Luxembourg with 11,000 men across the ice-‐covered inundations of the Holland Water Line (referred to above) with orders to burn The Hague. Even as he set out the wind changed direction and a great thaw set in, but Luxembourg was a stubborn commander, and he refused to turn back. His army then conducted a brutal campaign of rape and pillage, but they paid for their defiance of the
weather when, too late, they attempted to withdraw to the French lines as the ice melted behind them. Many died of exposure, or drowned in the dykes and canals.
Two films have exploited the dramatic possibilities of ice breaking up, most notably Eisenstein’s epic, Alexander Nevski. It portrays a battle of 1242 in which Teutonic knights on horseback charge across an ice-‐covered Russian lake, but plunge to their deaths through the cracks in the ice when it fails. In Ken Russell’s 1967 film, Billion Dollar Brain, starring Michael Caine, an invasion force of missile carriers disguised as petrol-‐tankers drive across the ice from Finland to attack the Soviet Union, but are likewise pitched into a watery grave by a single bomb dropped on the ice ahead of them.
Perhaps the villains in these films should have employed the method used by Marshal Zhukow, the Soviet commander during the Battle of Stalingrad. He needed to drive tanks across the frozen River Volga, but the ice was too thin; when the temperature dropped substantially, he ordered 25 fire-‐engines to pump water onto the ice, thickening it sufficiently to bear the weight of tanks. Like Charles X of Sweden, Zhukov intended to be master of his environment, not its servant.
One of the most frequent effects of water on the landscape is to reduce it to mud, which, following his Russian campaign, Napoleon described as ‘the fifth element’. It comes in many forms, and an officer in Holland in 1944 referred to ‘hard mud, soft mud, gravel mud, mud with ice in it, and the sort you can’t tell if it’s mud or dirty wafer’ (Edmonds, 1948). In 1917, an Allied offensive saw infantry and tanks bogged down comprehensively in what came to be known as the ‘swamps of Passchendale.’ The diary of the German commander, Crown Price Ruprecht of Bavaria, refers to ‘Rain, our best ally’, but torrential rain was only a contributory cause (Edmonds, 1948). The real responsibility lay with a ten day artillery bombardment that had destroyed the intricate drainage system of the low-‐lying ground and turned it into a quagmire. This outcome had been forecast by the Royal Engineers and the Tank Corps, but their warnings were dismissed by the British High Command. This was a case of ‘self-‐inflicted’ environmental surprise.
In early October 1941 the German advance on Moscow was checked outside the city of Mtsensk by Russian resistance, but, the following day a far more effective halt was imposed on the German advance by the environment. During that night the first snow fell, and in the morning it thawed, causing the German commander, General Guderian, to write, ‘the roads rapidly became canals of bottomless mud, along which our vehicles could proceed only at a snails’ pace’ (Guderian,
1952). Within days this early onset of the Russian winter had ruled mobile warfare out of the question until the following spring. Returning to dry land, the seashore seems to occupy a ‘no-‐man’s land’ between navy and army, and the rarity of engagements means that the latter’s battle experience is so limited that surprise has the chance to thrive. At the battle of the Dunkirk Dunes, Marshal Turenne’s French army fought a Spanish army whose right flank rested on the beach. The French made a mock attack in the centre to gain time until the tide had gone out, then their cavalry attacked along the beach, in the gap between the Spanish and the waves, enveloping and routing the Spanish army.
During the Peninsular War the Duke of Wellington faced a French defence line along the Bidassoa river, from the mountains to its estuary. To attempt a frontal assault would have been too costly, so Wellington implemented a deception plan which drew the French command’s attention away from the coast to the inland flank. The one to two kilometre-‐wide estuary had a tidal range of five metres, and at low water the narrow freshwater channels of the Bidassoa meandered through mud-‐flats. Attack from this quarter was so clearly impossible that only two French outposts guarded the last five kilometres of the estuary. In the ports of Irun and Funterabia, however, Wellington discovered, by secret inquiries amongst the local fisherman, that at low tide there were three places where the channels were shallow enough for infantry to cross. On a morning when the fords had only one metre of water in them, the 5th Division marched across the mudflats and river channels, making a dash for Hendaye on the far side. Simultaneous attacks were launched along the river’s entire length, obscuring from the French the real focus of the operation. So complete was the surprise that the 5th Division’s light companies were across the estuary before a shot was fired, and within hours the French, finding their seaward flank exposed, had withdrawn completely from the river line.
In May 1943 a thrust by six British tanks along a Tunisian beach, not unlike the French move at Dunkirk dunes, precipitated the final German collapse in North Africa. General von Broich, commander of 10th Panzer Division, commented after his capture, ‘The breakthrough at the Hammam Lif defile amazes me. I did not think it was possible’ (Daily Telegraph, 16 December 1994). At this stage in the war all German forces in North Africa were intending to make a last stand in the Cap Bon peninsular, which was being prepared as a redoubt. Because the interior was so mountainous, the British armoured forces could only gain access to the peninsular along a narrow coastal corridor which, at Hammam Lif, narrowed to a 300 metre wide bottleneck, the seaside resort occupying all the low ground between an extinct volcano
and the seashore. At low tide the beach was only 50 metres wide and had buildings crowding to its very edge, while the town was well-‐prepared for defence, with numerous 88 mm guns supported by snipers, artillery and a lavish use of mines. For two days the Allied advance was held up in these streets, causing 26th Armoured Brigade heavy casualties and allowing the German the opportunity to regroup. The defences were finally turned when the left flank squadron of 2nd Lothian and Border Horse, showing typical yeomanry daring, struck out along the beach and through the Mediterranean surf.
The sand was just firm enough to take the great weight of the tanks, and the shoreline was the one avenue of approach that had been overlooked by the German defenders. Thirty minutes later the tanks emerged behind the town, having put its garrison at a hopeless disadvantage.
Mist and fog are amongst the commonest reasons for surprise on the battlefield. Like dust and rain they reduce ranges of visibility, deaden the sound of movement and dull the alertness of sentries. For the infantry, few things are more unnerving than being charged by tanks that emerge at very short range from a bank of fog. The effect can be psychologically unbalancing, just as when, driving in fog, a car suddenly lurches towards one out of the gloom. The Wars of the Roses’ (1455-‐1485) battle of Barnet took place in just such an all-‐pervading morning mist. The opposing
forces initially facing one another in lines running from west to east across a ridge of high ground that ran through low-‐lying marshes. The Yorkists were to the south and the Lancastrians to the north. At an early stage the Earl of Oxford’s force of Lancastrians, on the western flank, broke the Yorkists opposite them and, intent on plunder, pursued them off the battlefield in the direction of London. When they had eventually groped their way back north-‐ward through the mist to rejoin the battle, they believed they would be attacking the rear of the Yorkist lines. In the meanwhile, however, the line of battle had swung on its axis and it now ran north to south. Oxford’s Lancastrians therefore emerged from the mist only to blunder into Somerset’s Lancastrians, who mistook Oxford’s banner of a radiant star for the standard of a sun with rays of the Yorkist king, Edward IV. In the resulting ‘friendly fire’ incident a number of both Somerset’s and Oxford’s Lancastrians died. But, of greater consequence, this raised the suspicion of treachery, which had been all too common an occurrence in this bloody civil war, and this cry spread rapidly through the Lancastrian ranks, sapping their morale and leading to their collapse.
Perhaps the most famous of battles fought in fog was at Inkerman, in 1854 during the Crimean War. During the night prior to the battle, completely undetected in a dense fog, the Russian managed to concentrate 40,000 troops within metres of the 3,000 British troops guarding in the Inkerman sector. At dawn these Russian hordes attacked without warning, in visibility down to less than 20 metres. With complete surprise and a numerical advantage of 10:1, three-‐quarters of Mount Inkerman was soon in Russian hands, but the fight then became a confused struggle between detached crowds of soldiers. It was pre-‐eminently a soldier’s battle, for officers could exert little or no control in the dense fog, as men grappled with one another in
desperate hand to hand conflict, scarcely recognising who was who in the swirling fog. The most famous painting of the battle is The Death of General Cathcart, exhibited in the museum of the Durham Light Infantry, but it is misleading as it portrays a scene which was, in reality, quite invisible. Paradoxically, the very density of the fog worked in favour of the British since, had they been able to see the overwhelming numbers that they faced, their morale might not have held up through the several hours of bitter fighting they had to endure until reinforcement arrived.
Like fog, snow can severely reduce visibility and deaden the sound of military preparations for an attack. Such a case was the battle of Trenton, during the American War of Independence. A well known song by Johnny Cash contains these lines, ‘We’re kind of proud of that ragged old flag. You see, we got a little hole in that flag there when Washington took it across the Delaware’ (Cash, 1974). It refers to George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware River to surprise the German garrison in the town of Trenton on Boxing Day, 1776. Correctly guessing that the garrison would still be in bed, recovering from their Christmas Day drinking parties, Washington’s force set off on a bitterly cold night for a 25 kilometre approach march. In a blinding snowstorm they crossed the Delaware in boats, although the river was running high and fast, and full of ice-‐floes. At first light the snow began to fall again, now mingled with sleet
and rain that froze and glazed the road. As one historian wrote, ‘It was a night when an indifferent soldier would cover his head with his blanket, and a mercenary would hug the fire ‘ (Freeman, 1951). In the driving snow the sound of the attackers’ approach was deadened, and they succeeded in completely surprising the garrison, who surrendered after only the briefest of fights. The cost to the Americans of Washington’s victory was five wounded and two dead – frozen to death.
Another battle from the Wars of the Roses, was at Towton, south-‐west of York, and marked by a stone cross, illustrated. It was fought in a driving snowstorm. But in this case it was the effect of the wind rather than the snow which was harnessed to the military requirements of King Edward IV’s Yorkists. The battle began in a blinding snowstorm, which a powerful wind from the south drove into the faces of the Lancastrians, who were drawn up on a rise. The Yorkist archers, to the south, advanced a few paces, fired a single volley into the Lancastrians and withdrew. The Lancastrian archers immediately returned the fire, but the combination of the strong headwind and the withdrawal of the
Yorkist archers caused the arrows to fall short by 60 yards – ’By 40 tailor’s yards’, as one contemporary account has it (it also commented, ‘All the time it snew’) – onto empty ground. Not seeing this, because of the driving snow, the Lancastrians continued to shoot until they ran out of arrows, at which point the Yorkist archers advanced once again and launched a steady stream of arrows, using the enemy’s spent arrows in no-‐man’s-‐land as well as their own. The constant losses amongst their ranks ultimately antagonised the Lancastrians into a disordered downhill charge which resulted in their defeat, and also in heavy casualties, which were the greatest of any battle fought on British soil.
With modern forecasting techniques we should no longer be surprised by changes in wind direction – knowledge which is today even more crucial than in the past, because of the importance of the NBC threat. But even the most sophisticated computer systems, predicting the weather at given points on a battlefield at short notice, require detailed and long-‐term local knowledge to provide the data necessary for prediction, and information which is both ‘local’ and ‘long-‐term’ is usually ‘a rare luxury for military forces’ (Hewish, 1993), especially when they are involved in Out of Area Operations. In the Gulf War the prevailing wind in the region was from the north-‐west, so that the smoke from the oil-‐field fires blew predominantly over the Allied lines. It was merely a matter of luck than on G-‐Day the land assault was launched when the wind was from the south-‐east, the opposite direction, so that a chemical attack, if one had been launched, would have blown back across the Iraqi positions.
One of the oldest tricks in the book is the attack out of the sun, and it is also one of the easiest ways to create surprise on the battlefield. This is especially so in the desert, where the glare of the sun at its zenith in the early afternoon is added to the enervating effect of the heat on those on watch. During the advance from Alamein to Tunis pilots of the Luftwaffe began a regular practise of attacking Royal Air Force (RAF) airfields out of the sun, thereby blinding the gun-‐layers on the Royal Artillery anti-‐aircraft guns. In response, with RAF agreement that their aircraft would never approach from that sector, all guns received standing orders to open an immediate ‘umbrella’ or directional barrage against anything heard or seen in that part of the sky. After two more attacks, in each of which one or more ME 109’s were shot down, enemy pilots became less keen on what had become known as ‘sun-‐diving’.
The setting sun can also assist an attacker. In the 1st Battle of Alamein, in July 1942, and with the future of Egypt in the balance, Rommel’s 21st Panzer Division launched an attack against the Ruweisat Ridge at 1830 hours, just as the sun was setting. Initially this gave an advantage to the attackers, both by shining directly into the eyes of the defenders and by casting the attackers into deep shade, and artillery observers found it difficult to engage the oncoming targets. Once battle was joined, however, the dust cast up by shells landing to the rear of the advancing tanks began to form a screen to the sun’s rays and also provided an excellent backdrop against which the attacking panzers were now outlined as easy targets. In this case one environmental factor – the dust – was acting to nullify or even reverse another.
Despite the assistance of high speed computers and satellite imagery even weather forecasters such as Michael Fish found themselves ‘surprised’ by the hurricane of 1987. Yet in World War Two, when weather forecasting was only in its infancy, there were two instances where weather forecasters contributed largely to achieving military surprises. The first was Operation Overlord, on the morning of 5th June 1944, Rommel left Normandy to go on leave in Bavaria on the strength of a German forecast which had ruled out the possibility of an invasion. Yet on the very next day, D-‐Day, the invasion was launched, during a lull in the Channel storms which, crucially, the German forecaster in Paris had failed to spot. Allied meteorologists had sprung a highly effective surprise on the Germans, who since an early stage in the war had been denied access to data from weather stations in the Atlantic.
Surprise was equally crucial to success in the second example, the 1944 Christmas offensive in the Ardennes. Here German weather forecasters turned the tables and outwitted their Allied counterparts. With their eyes focused elsewhere, the Allied planning staffs had dismissed the possibility of an armoured offensive through the lightly held sector of US 8th Corps in the Ardennes because of its difficult terrain, wrongly, as it happens, since the Ardennes had been used as a strategic corridor by the German army on at least three occasions, in 1914, 1918 and 1940.
Yet the greatest surprise to the Allies was not the use of so-‐called ‘impossible’ terrain, but the fact that the Germans launched their offensive under cover of the most appalling weather. In mid-‐November Werner Schwerdtfeger, chief of the Luftwaffe’ Central Weather Group, had been given, as he described it, ‘a mission impossible’, being required to forecast, at two days notice, ‘the date of a period of five days or more, in which fog or low clouds will continuously cover a wide area of the River Rhine north of the 50° parallel, approximately, including the region of the Ardennes and southern England’ (Schwerdtfeger, 1986). His forecast was correct and warm, moist Atlantic air moving eastwards over the snow of the Ardennes created a thick convection fog lasting several days, leaving Allied aircraft in England and France grounded for the duration, allowing General von Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer Army to attack and achieve complete surprise. Only when the weather changed again were the Allies able to overcome their initial stunned reaction and throw the German back.
Summary
Any number of environmental effects which have led to surprise in battle have not been referred to above for lack of space, not least rain, which arguably lost the battle of Waterloo for Napoleon. Others include night and darkness, storms at sea, coastline effects on amphibious landings, the sun, animals, thunder and lightning.
The analysis of the 120 battles, ancient and modern, which were referred to in the introduction, did not pretend to be either comprehensive or scientific, but the following three results may be worth noting (see Figure 3, below):
a. in 53% of actions environmental causes of surprise were manmade, as against natural in 47% b. in 61% of actions surprise was planned, as against accidental in 39% c. in 69% of actions or battles surprise was exploited, but disregarded in 31%
So, finally, are there any antidotes to surprise? Four things suggest themselves, firstly, the commander who expects to be surprised will be half-‐way to defusing the effect. Secondly, always train with surprise in mind – ‘If is far better to accustom your unit to fast balls’ on training than let them experience them for the first time in real battle (Take On, 1943). Thirdly, always maintain a reserve – in the film Red October, the American National Security Adviser says ‘I’m a politician, which means I’m a cheat and a liar, and when I’m not kissing babies I’m stealing their lollipops. It also means that I keep my options open’ Finally, always counter surprise with surprise – Stonewall Jackson, one of the past-‐masters of surprise, exhorted his officers to, ‘always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy’ (Imboden, 1884-‐1888), while General Sir Francis Tuker wrote, ‘Surprise and surprise again; when the first surprise is dying away, confront one’s opponent with yet another. When the first form of surprise cannot be repeated, confront him with another’ (Tuker, 1963). References
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