Offspring of Mars

This is Emanuel Buttigieg's new book, published by Helion, on the Knights of Malta, 1614-1714. It covers the later period, after the Great Siege of Malta, though the Ottomans remained a threat.  This is especially timely for me, as the Knights are a significant element in my current project. 

The Knights of Malta, formerly the Order of St John (Knights Hospitaller), have been based in Malta since 1530. They operated as an independent religious and military state, governed by a Grand Master. Its principal role was to defend Christian interests against the Ottoman Empire and the North African Barbary corsairs. During the seventeenth century, the Order's galleys and later larger sailing warships conducted regular expeditions against Ottoman and North African shipping, capturing enemy vessels and taking prizes. This activity, known as corsairing, brought considerable wealth to Malta and helped develop Malta's economy. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Knights were beginning to experience changes in their traditional role. The development of larger European navies and changes in Mediterranean warfare gradually reduced the importance of its traditional galley fleet. After 1700, its maritime operations against the Barbary corsairs began to decline, reducing the wealth generated through captured ships and cargoes. 

The author starts with an overview of the Knights' structure and how they continued to finance and strengthen their base in Malta. The Knights were supported by a much larger force of locally recruited soldiers, who increasingly played an important role, both on ships and as landing infantry.

In the first half of the century, the Knights attacked towns in North Africa (Barbary pirates) and launched expeditions into their former hunting grounds in the eastern Mediterranean, as far as Crete, Cyprus and Egypt. These were not large fleets, typically consisting of up to ten ships. Initially, galleys, but sailing ships were becoming important. Increasing firepower meant that galleys had to be strengthened, and their own firepower increased. Attack was deemed to be the best form of defence, and supporting allies fighting the Ottomans was a regular use of the fleet. Many maps show how Malta's defences were strengthened with the latest designs.

From my last trip in 2002

The second half of the century saw their wars supporting Venice, despite strained relations. The Knights felt that Venice all too often made compromises with the Ottomans to maintain trade links. The Cretan War and the later wars for the Morea were major struggles that strained the Knights' finances and manpower. 

There are some fine pictures of reenactors, which will be useful for wargamers and modellers. This was a transitional period for weapon use on land and at sea. The author has made extensive use of the archives, and the reports tell the story of the Knights in a different way from the traditional narrative. This substantial tome, reflected in the price, is essential reading for anyone interested in the period.

I have some figures from Front Rank, North Star and League of Augsburg for this period. I need to crack on with the painting, but I will include a unit of landing infantry from the Knights. 

Some of my Black Seas galleys.

Moghul: The Serpent's Tooth

 This is the latest, and fifth, in my bedtime reading of Alex Rutherford's historical fiction series on the early Mughal emperors. This book focuses on Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor.

Shah Jahan was born in 1592 as Prince Khurram, the son of Emperor Jahangir and the grandson of Akbar the Great. After a struggle for succession following Jahangir's death, in which he killed all competitors, he became emperor in 1628. Shah Jahan strengthened Mughal imperial authority and maintained a large empire of over 100 million people. He led military campaigns in India's Deccan region, though he failed to capture Kandahar from the Persian Empire.

He is best known for the buildings he commissioned, which were so expensive that they nearly emptied the treasury. The most famous is the Taj Mahal, built in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631. Other famous sites include the Red Fort in Delhi and Jama Masjid, one of India's largest mosques. While these were fabulous buildings, they don't necessarily make for great fiction, though the author does capture his obsession with both his wife and the building. 

As with almost all of the series, his rule ended in a succession dispute. The savage ‘throne or coffin’ traditions of his ancestors – descendants of Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine. Unusually, his children were from the same wife, which he hoped would minimise conflict. In 1657, Shah Jahan fell seriously ill, though Rutherford argues his children used this as an excuse to revolt against the eldest son and likely successor, Dara Shikoh. Another son, Aurangzeb, defeated his rivals in the war of succession and imprisoned Shah Jahan in Agra Fort. He died in 1666 and was buried beside Mumtaz Mahal in the Taj Mahal.

I've enjoyed this series, and we have played a few games of Scourge of Princes, dusting off my 28mm collection. The first book was the best, although, in fairness, Babur has the best storyline. A Disney TV series is based on the books, but sadly it is only streamed in India. Hello Disney, people outside India are interested in Indian history!

Naval actions in the Italian-Ottoman War 1911-12

 Having completed the land armies for the Italian-Ottoman War, I decided to look at the naval units. For those unfamiliar with this little-known conflict, here is a handy meme that summarises the war.

The Italian Navy dominated the naval conflict; in 1911, it was one of the best in the world. For the initial actions against Ottoman Libya, it deployed two squadrons commanded by Vice-Admiral Augusto Aubry. The First Squadron had four battleships and five cruisers. The Second Squadron had three battleships and six cruisers. It also had seven light cruisers and about 62 destroyers and torpedo boats. The Italians had laid down dreadnoughts, but these were not yet available. However, they wouldn't face anything that required this level of firepower.

The pre-dreadnought battleship Roma, in the First Squadron.

The Ottoman Navy was much smaller, with few modern warships. It had two obsolete battleships, two cruisers, and seven destroyers based in Beirut. It also had two cruisers and four torpedo boats in Albania, and a destroyer and gunboats in the Red Sea. The two modern German Brandenburg-class battleships were in Constantinople with 12 torpedo boats.

German Brandenburg-class battleships

Even the modern Ottoman warships were in poor condition and largely stayed in harbour. As a 1910 British report put it: ‘At present the Turks have neither the officers to navigate and fight, nor the crews to man the ships which they have bought from the Germans, nor are they likely to for some time to come.’

This gave the Italians control of the sea, enabling them to bombard Ottoman ports in Libya with little opposition, other than coastal batteries. As a consequence, the war in Libya revolved around the Italians holding the ports and then launching attacks against the Ottomans and their tribal allies in the desert. This generally went badly for the Italians.

The Libyan part of the war is well recorded, not least because of the useful diaries published by the Ottoman commander Enver Pasha. However, the war spread across the Mediterranean, with the Italians attacking Ottoman positions to force them to abandon resistance in Libya. There were attacks on Beirut in February 1912, and then in the Aegean. As with navies before and after, attacking up the Dardanelles proved too much for the Italian navy. In March 1912, they sent torpedo boats toward Constantinople without success. A further attack in July reached the Ottoman fleet, but torpedo boats were not enough to have any impact. Italy's allies, which included Britain, opposed any blockade of the Straits.

The more realistic plan involved capturing islands off the Anatolian coast. The most interesting was the capture of Rhodes, with two infantry regiments. The Ottomans had to abandon the town of Rhodes because of the threat of naval bombardment. The Italians landed farther south, but they had to use the ships' boats because they had no landing craft. The navy occupied many smaller islands with little resistance, taking 13 of the 15 islands by May 1912. The Italians were supposed to return the islands after the peace treaty, but they held onto them until the end of WW2, when they were given to Greece.

Small naval actions occurred in the Adriatic. Five Italian destroyers under the Duke of the Abruzzi chased off two Ottoman torpedo boats near Preveza, and Ottoman coastal batteries opened fire. Two Italian destroyers entered the port and sank two Ottoman torpedo boats. While a small-scale action, all the European Great Powers, and most particularly Italy’s ally Austria-Hungary, were extremely sensitive to any disturbance of the status quo in the Balkans. As Bismarck put it, a ‘damned silly thing in the Balkans’ might precipitate a wider European war.

For more on this conflict, I highly recommend Charles Stephenson's book, A Box of Sand. He covers all the campaigns, including the naval actions.

I built a decent-sized Italian fleet in 1-3000 scale, as I intend to do the Adriatic actions against the Austrians in WW1. Plus a small Ottoman fleet for a few hit-and-run actions. We tried this in the midweek game, using an adaptation of DBA, which is simple, but it's not very convincing. I will need to research a better set of rules. However, I did manage to inflict some damage in the game, which, given my complete lack of naval skills, was quite pleasing. I usually crash my ships!

Italian

Ottoman

The Italians are bombarding the coast as I sneak up on them.

Afghan Frontier

This book by Victoria Schfield examines Afghanistan's border regions and how they have, throughout history, become crossroads of conflict. Afghanistan is called the crossroads of conflict because its unique position as a central geographic corridor connecting South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, combined with rugged terrain and intense rivalries among regional and global powers, makes it a flashpoint.

The author takes a largely chronological approach, first explaining the region's geography and the tribes who live there. I picked this book up largely because I was reading a series on the Mughals, who entered India via Afghanistan. Our first understanding comes from Alexander the Great's earlier invasion of India. 

The geography includes the Hindu Kush and vast, rugged highlands, which make military occupation extraordinarily difficult and provide natural strongholds and cave networks for local fighters against invading forces. Afghanistan has multiple distinct ethnic groups and tribes that often prefer localised tribal codes and Islamic governance over centralised state authority, making unified national rule hard to sustain. A Pashtu proverb says, "Honour ate up the mountains, and taxes ate up the plains."

Britain was drawn into Afghanistan to defend India. This led to disastrous expeditions. It is astonishing how they even got there, given the officers' travelling baggage. Sixty camels were considered reasonable for a brigadier, and forty servants for a junior officer. In the first Kabul tragedy, 30,000 camels and 38,000 camp followers were involved. In the early 20th century, the RAF was used extensively to pacify the tribes and effectively win the Third Afghan War. By 1936, there was a code which involved a two-day warning before the rebel village was bombed, to allow civilians to escape.

Attempts at bribing officials and judges were rarely successful. The British Empire at least got something right, though the incentives were small. One judge was offered a golf ball if he would acquit a family of murder. In the Second World War, there was an Axis plan to join up the Japanese and German invasions, a story I covered in my book on Turkey during WW2. The British fortified the Afghan border, including dragon's teeth anti-tank obstacles that can be seen today. The book overplays the non-aggression pact between Turkey and Germany and its impact on British Islamic propaganda. Turkey was never an ally of Germany.

The Afghan army of the period was not insignificant. It had 103,000 men and had received a significant loan from the Germans to train and possibly equip a full division. The Afghan Air Force had British-trained pilots flying 20 Hawker Harts and 8 Hawker Hinds.

The book ends with the Soviet occupation in support of the communist government. This led to the West supporting Islamic groups, which came back to bite them through the Taliban. It ends before the evacuation and the appalling conditions in the country, particularly for women, today.

The book is pretty detailed, but it includes lots of interesting stories that liven up the narrative.

I have a 19th-century Afghan army and the British in 10mm, which I haven't dusted off in some time. I built them as another opponent for my Zulu and Boer War British armies. Osprey has a good book on the wars.

Some of my Afghans. Fun to paint.

Gordon Highlanders Museum

 I was up in Aberdeen today for work. After finishing just before lunch, I decided to visit the Gordon Highlanders Museum, a short bus ride from the city centre.

The Gordon Highlanders were one of the British Army's most famous infantry regiments. Their identity was closely tied to northeast Scotland, particularly Aberdeenshire and the Highlands, and to the distinctive Highland kilt and pipers. The regiment existed as the Gordon Highlanders from 1881 to 1994, when it amalgamated with the Queen's Own Highlanders to form the Highlanders (Seaforth, Gordons and Camerons), which later became part of the Royal Regiment of Scotland.

The regiment was raised in 1794. Its early service included the Napoleonic Wars, famously attaching themselves to the stirrups of the Scots Greys at Waterloo.

During the nineteenth century, the regiment's predecessors served in several important British campaigns overseas, including the Indian Mutiny, the Second Anglo-Afghan War, and the Battle of Dargai Heights, 1897. This became one of the regiment's most celebrated actions, and a fabulous painting hangs in the dining hall. 

Nine battalions fought in the First World War with 50,000 recruits; 29,000 became casualties, including 9,000 dead. The Second World War started badly for two battalions, the 1st and 5th, of the 51st (Highland) Division, which were surrounded and forced to surrender at Saint-Valery-en-Caux in June 1940.

The regiment fought in North Africa and Italy, and later in North-West Europe, 1944–1945. Another battalion was captured in Singapore and suffered horrendous losses as prisoners of the Japanese.

It isn't a large museum, but the exhibits are well presented with some excellent dioramas. The staff are knowledgeable and helpful. The cafe also has decent cake! Well worth a look.

Partisan 2, 2026

 Another return to the Newark Showground today for Partisan 2, stopping on my way home from London. I have always driven here, which makes it clear there is no public transport to the site, which isn't great for a showground. The Edinburgh train and an Albanian taxi driver got me there with a Balkan twist!

As usual, it was well organised once there, and we dealt with the long queue quickly, although there doesn't seem to be a system for those who bought advance tickets, which might speed things up a bit. 

Partisan is primarily a game show, although most of the main traders were there. The train limited my purchases, which probably worked out just as well. 

While Partisan is best known for its big display games, it also offers a wide range of smaller participation games. These were very good this year. Sadly, no time to play, but there seemed to be plenty of takers.

The big games were also excellent, and most were doable at the club rather than just amazing modelling.

I'm big into India at present so I enjoyed this.

Wild West action using a new Osprey rule set.

Lust for Glory is now available to download.

                                           

Matildas are one of my favourite tanks, so Arras is an excellent scenario.

The Very British Civil War is an excellent campaign. I must dust down my collection

Minden, very well done.

Here come the Normans!

A very popular Full Nelson participation game. The Battle of Poza de Santa Isabel, 1808.

For October, it's quite warm, but not quite Foreign Legion.

Joe Bilton's amazing French village for May 1940, Montcornet.

Eutaw Springs 1781

Malplaquet using Lily Banners