By John Dong

In English language scholarship, the military performance of late Imperial China often conjures
up images of men in tiger pyjamas armed with scimitars and shields with grotesque and garish
faces painted on them, or perhaps Manchu Bannermen drawing back dusty arrows on their
composite bows unchanged for hundreds of years. These, as scholar Jane Elliott pointed out in
her book on the Boxer War, are symptoms of the “loser school” of Chinese military history, one
which relies heavily on antiquated or deeply biased generalisations about the Chinese military.
There is no doubt that the state of the Chinese military left much to be desired, but, as Allen
Fung points out, the prevalence of the “loser school” has produced a mad witch hunt for
shortcomings that the Chinese military suffered from, leading to conclusions that the Chinese
military was entirely incompetent without any merit whatsoever.

The First Sino-Japanese War is highly emblematic of this school, as most English language
accounts are written using only Japanese or Western sources, which are most certainly valuable
but do leave out the “other side of the hill.” For example, in her book on the First Sino-Japanese
War, S.C.M. Paine chose to reproduce several articles written by Western travellers describing
Manchu troops en route to Pyongyang, which focus on their degeneracy, hedonism, and overall
total and utter incompetence in behaviour, training, and equipment. These descriptions are
intended to be representative of the entire Chinese military institution. But should the Chinese
record be examined, one will find that modernized troops equipped with magazine rifles and
Gatling guns were indeed dispatched to Pyongyang, but by steamships that would not have
permitted foreign writers onboard. Therefore, although the Western sources in this case are not
factually incorrect or imprecise, they fail to provide a full view of the situation.

As a corollary to the “loser school,” the Japanese military establishment during the First
Sino-Japanese War is often seen as fully “modernized” and a direct and ultimate contrast to the
Chinese. Contemporary English language works on the subject were translations of or drawn
heavily from public-facing Japanese government reports, most of which was an airbrushed
telling of events. Nevertheless, this has entrenched itself as the definitive version of the war in
English language scholarship. However, modern or recently published Japanese language
sources, many having been withheld during the Imperial era, are often horrifyingly blunt on the
deficiencies of the army. For example, General Tatsumi Naofumi’s push into Manchuria and
subsequent retreat is not portrayed as a “victorious” sortie against a cowering enemy, but a
forced march in the dead of winter when most of the Japanese were dressed only in thin
summer uniforms without proper winter gear due to supply issues.

It is therefore hoped that the publication of both volumes of Sunstruck Giant: The First
Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 will convey a more balanced and faithful impression of the First
Sino-Japanese War in the English language and do justice to the triumphs and tragedies of both
sides, so that my three years’ labour shall not have been in vain.

Volume One focuses on the specific armies involved, and the attitudes and actions they
undertook with regards to military modernization. Special attention is given to the military
uniforms of the Chinese side, as the First Sino-Japanese War is the single most prolific source
of currently existing late Qing Chinese military garments today. Additionally, study of these
highly valuable artifacts has generally been overlooked due to the low social status of their
owners.

Volume Two, using previously untranslated sources examines the actual course of the war and
intends to portray events in a fair and impartial perspective, neglecting neither the courageous
ardour nor dreadful blunders of either side, and go some way in challenging the dominant “loser
school,” and honour those whose claims to respect and heroism have been hitherto ignored.

By Nic Fields

Strong characters are, as a rule, rough, disagreeable and aggressive.

Charles de Gaulle, Le Fils de l’epée

Hoplites depicted on a globular arýballos c. 625 BCE, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Antikensammlung, inv. 2001.330 (ArchaiOptix/Wikimedia Commons/ CC-BY-SA-4.0)

In choosing to study the ancient world the student pretty much ends up in a world of approximations, one where perception, judgement, even facts, are in suspension, and could shift at a moment’s notice. Still, in the real world, even the ancient one, the student needs to study people, not pure hardware.

We still exist in an age of war. It is a terrible and impassioned drama regulated, it is true, by four or five general rules (invariably disregarded). Rules or no rules, it is the rough edge of battle, combat, that is the most important drama in a soldier’s life. It occupies only a short time. Nonetheless, these vivid moments acquire an extraordinary importance, since it is within the arena of the red field of battle that he witnesses the greatest violence in war. For him it is a wildly unstable physical and emotion environment; a world of boredom and bewilderment (which makes up the great part of the ordinary soldier’s experience), of depression and delirium, of triumph and terror, of anger and angst, of courage and cowardice. And for a mercenary throughout history, from the Achaemenid Persian satrap’s spear bearer to the African warlord’s cannon fodder, this is the chaotic world of mad magnificence where he earns his daily bread.

Archilochos of Páros (fl. c. 650 BCE) declared himself to be ‘the servant of lord Enyalios and an expert in the lovely gift of the Muses’.[1] By making a double commitment to war and poetry, he reworks the epic idea that men should be speakers of words and doer of deeds.[2] At some point early in his life he joined the Parian colony of Thásos,[3] an island in the northern Aegean Sea he colourfully describes as standing ‘like the spine of a donkey, crowned with wild forests’.[4] It was also home to ‘Thracian dogs’,[5] a ferocious and warlike people who posed a serious threat to the remote colony in the shadow lands of the Greek world. And then there were the raiders from the island of Náxos,[6] Páros’ larger neighbour and traditional rival in the Cyclades. The young Archilochos would have taken part in these military adventures.

Apparently, following a broken marriage arrangement, he spent the rest of his life in the hard profession of a mercenary until he was killed in battle or in a fight sometime in the mid 7^th century BCE. His poetry is concerned with his personal circumstances — war and battle, revenge and conflict, love and sex, food and drink — and so offers us a rare, intimate glance into the way of life and death of a workaday mercenary. He had been in battle and knew how to paint its shock and struggle, its perils and surprises, with an art that was all his own; a source from around the campfire, the rarest of tools for the student of the ancient world.

Of course, he is not necessarily in the first part of his utterance informing his audience that he is a professional soldier, any more than in the second he is declaring himself a professional bard who earns his living from his verse.[7] Still, Enyalios is Ares at his most barbaric: Ares the awesome war god, the fully armoured, brazen divine warrior whose war chariot is harnessed to Fear and Panic, an overwhelming, insatiable battlefield denizen, wholly destructive and man slaughtering.[8] It is the kind of bloody nightmare that comes from the personal experience of war, shared by soldiers throughout history, from the youthful recruit who nervously stood at Philippi to the long in the tooth Falklands War veteran and, of course, those warriors who have come after. The grim business of war, as Archilochos knows it, is hideous, cruel, and unprejudiced: ‘Erxies (?); for in truth Ares is impartial to men’.[9] By holding a mirror to the nasty reality of combat, a spear can thus bring death, enrich, or even satisfy:

In my spear is my daily [barley] bread, and in my spear my Ismaric wine; but it’s with my spear I drink when I recline.[10]

It is easy to visualise a battle worn Archilochos with a twisted wafer of barley bread in his left hand,[11] the right hand holding up his leathern bag of wine to his sun cracked lips, his rail-thin frame leaning on his spear, which is caught in the crook of his right elbow. Hence the weapon becomes more than an instrument of death; it is a part of Archilochos’ life and his mental makeup. In short, his spear is like an old, trusted comrade.

Whatever his reasons for becoming a mercenary, his priorities are often very similar to most others once he has settled in to the new way of life. Generally they are concerned with problems of finding sufficient food, adequate shelter, a dry bed, strong alcohol, and a woman of easy virtue, and with staying alive until the sun has risen on a new day. Soldiering brings out many things in a man, but above all it makes him measurelessly down-to-earth. ‘But how come you so bare?’ the peacenik Erasmus once asked the warmongering soldier. ‘Why’, he braggingly shot back, ‘whatsoever I got from pay, plunder, sacrilege, rapine and theft was spent in wine, whores and gaming’.[12] Desiderius Erasmus was the marvel of Renaissance Europe with his scholarship and his study of antiquity, but, on the other hand, it was still a cruel and crude age, and states could not stop their subjects privateering or enlisting in foreign armies. Such matters seem timeless, and indeed they are.

As the mercenary-cum-versifier Archilochos, using the sticky and the earthy wit typical of a fighter hardened to a mean and often cruel life, once sung: ‘We often see how wealth that was built up by much hard work all drains away into a harlot’s gut’.[13] And once again blurring the lines between refined and coarse behaviour at the edge of war, has this to report:

She was slurping like a Thracian or Phrygian man sucking beer through a pipe, and she was bent over and working away.[14]

That the girl is working obviously implies she is a prostitute, and this scenario of fellatio and copulation becomes a trope of Greek erotica on 5^th-century BCE Attic red-figure ware commonly used in those social occasions for wealthy men to enjoy wine, women, and wisdom, the symposia.

Though exaggerated for effect, this sort of harsh-tongued vulgarity merely colours common knowledge. We get the distinct impression that Archilochos was the sort of old sweat who drinks to get drunk, and goes straight from upright and thirsty to horizontal and silent: no unseemly shouting or brawling, no ‘who dare meddle with me’ taproom heroics. He probably had not developed the capacity for small talk, could never see the point of it. He was a proud man who would forever keep his own counsel. No need, use or call for banter. Nor had he ever had much sensitivity to what others were feeling. He was completely comfortable with himself, a quality uncommon enough anywhere, and one so remarkable in a band of hired killers and cutthroats. Indeed, Archilochos has already taken the trouble to tell us the label of the wine he prefers, and Ismaric is not your vin ordinaire at all, it is a vintage wine powerful enough to knock out a man-eating one-eyed giant. For this is ‘the ruddy, irresistible wine’ that the wily Odysseus once used to get Polyphemos blind drunk, thereby executing his escape.[15]

Combat veterans learn early that fear is contagious and that a man who gives in to it was a man out of control, a man befuddled and confused and a danger to everyone around him, but especially to himself. To survive in combat, you have to be cool and calculating and clearheaded. But most of all, as a veteran believes, you have to have an infinite faith in the idea that you are going to survive the battle and make it home.

Picture this. The slow retreat becomes a panic-stricken rout. Already men are breaking away, running wild and witless here and there, flinging away their weapons to facilitate their swift career, crying out in fear and flying. It is a truism that he that thinks only how to flee counts every foeman twice. Colonel Charles Ardant du Picq, a brilliant young French officer whose writings concentrated on the behaviour of the individual under the stress of combat and, in particular, emphasised the vital importance of the morale and discipline of soldiers, once wrote the following:

Man’s heart is as changeable as fortune. Man shrinks back, apprehends danger in any effort in which he does not foresee success. There are some isolated characters of iron temper, who resist the tendency; but they are carried away by the great majority.[16]

Our scholarly colonel was soon to be mortally wounded in action during the opening stages of the Franco-Prussian War (15 August 1870).

This, however, was a concept that was hardly new. Archilochos knew, just as countless combatants before and after him knew, that the heart (Gk. thūmós) was that part of the man where rage and courage, fear and desire stalked:

O heart, my heart, seething with unmanageable woes, rise up (?) and defend yourself, setting your breast against the enemy in their ambush, and standing firm hard by the foe. When victorious, do not exult openly, but when defeated do not fall down lamenting at home, but rejoice in joyful times and grieve in bad ones in moderation. Know what pattern controls mankind.[17]

This was written by a fighter who knew what it was to be scared stiff. There is that old cliché: a coward dies a thousand deaths but a brave man only once. That is wrong, as Archilochos understood rightly enough. No man is once and for always a cringing coward, nor once and for always a courageous champion. On the contrary, a man will act cowardly and, at other times, act with courage, each in different measures, each with varying consistency. As anyone who has been to war knows, war is the great leveller. It shows a man as he really is, not as he would like to be, nor as he would like others to think he is. It shows him stripped, with his greatness mixed with pathetic fears and weaknesses.

The suppressing of one’s instinct for safety is not easy, particularly at moments when your stomach turns over and will not go back into its place. Archilochos certainly understood the occasional need for a touch of lifesaving cowardice, for during a Parian defeat at the hands of the Thracians he had fled with all speed, abandoning his aspís, as he twice calls it, to the enemy. What made this particular episode worse — plenty of his comrades without doubt had tossed aside their shields in the rout — was that this turbulent and fierce man had composed a poem about the event:

Some Saian [Thracian] glories in my shield, the blameless armour which I left by a bush, against my will. But I saved my own skin. What’s that shield to me? To hell with it! I’ll get another  just as good.[18]

We can picture a fox-skinned war band boiling up suddenly over a hill and charging down at Archilochos and his comrades with a mighty roar. The arc of the rhomphaía that would in a flash lay men low was soon to become nightmare reality, not mere rumour. The conclusion is obvious: Archilochos, in a later recollection, invokes the eminently sensible principle ‘get-away-before-he gets-you’. He had learned well the use of banality, how it can mask serious intent. Yet he was a man of no little education. He had much to say, chilling things to say too. His poems, masterpieces of mood and menace, are crystal clear depictions of real persons doing real things.

A hoplite’s shield, aspís, was a commitment to the phalanx,[19] and his abandonment, rhípsaspia, branded a man a shameless coward.[20] There is a story told by Plutarch that when ‘Archilochos happened to be in Sparta, they threw him out of the polis on an hour’s notice, since they understood he had written in a poem that it was better to throw away one’s weapon, rather than die’.[21] The anger of the Spartans of Archilochos’ mockery of a do-or-die approach espoused by them is better understood if we recall their parable about the mother’s last words to her departing son: ‘Come back with your shield or on it’.[22] And think of Thermopylai at a later date serving as an icon of glorious death rather following that intelligent maxim: ‘He who fights and runs away / Lives to fight another day’. Archilochos was no military coward but a realist who rejected the warrior ethos of Homeric epic in favour of self-preservation. Besides, by claiming he was willing to get a new shield indicates he intends to return to fighting.

Archilochos’ celebrity was in his bawdy voice of bitterness. Still, according to Kritias,[23] having between the betrothal quarrel and the loss of his shield made himself unpopular on Thásos, the poet threw up everything on the island and went out into the world a renegade. Following his bent, Archilochos became a mercenary: ‘And I shall be called a soldier of fortune (epíkouros) like a Karian’.[24] The erstwhile colonist, to whom the bleak existence in a precarious colony was a tedious and unrewarding way of life, happened to enlist in a band of mercenaries that was passing by, perhaps on their way to the Thracian mainland opposite Thásos. He came to know hunger and thirst, fever and vermin.[25] He grew accustomed to the barbaric surge of Thracian warriors, the din of battle and the sight of death. The Thracian wind tanned his skin; the constant wearing of bronze armour toughened his limbs; the measly rations made him lean.

Much like the wantonly violent but dashing reisläufer, Urs Graf der Ältere (c. 1485 Solothurn, c. 1529/1530 Basel), both woodcut artist and warrior for hire,[26] Archilochos kept his two calling cards in an unlikely accord. And so, the homicidal Ares did not complain that this satirist and lyricist took up his lyre and composed poetry, and the lovely Muses did not object that their horse-tail helmeted servant sometimes used military jargon to describe explicit sexual goings-on.[27] He was a soldier poet, one of the best, they say — he was regarded as a poet who rivalled Homer and Hesiod — and having read his work, fragmented though it is, we would agree.

---

^[1] Archilochos fr. 1. All fragments, unless otherwise specified, are from Laura Swift, Archilochus: The Poems (Oxford, 2019). See also, Martin L. West, Greek Lyric Poetry (Oxford, 2008), pp. 1-15, Ann Pippin Burnett, Three Archaic Poets (Cambridge MA, 1983), pp. 15-104, Guy Davenport, Archilochos, Sappho, Alkman (Berkeley/Los Angeles CA, 1980), pp. 17-76, François Lasserre, Archiloque, Fragments, (Paris, 1958), and John M. Edmonds, Elegy and Iambus (Cambridge MA, 1954), vol. 2.

[2] Iliad 9.440-3 Lattimore.

[3] The gold mines on the island, according to Herodotos (6.47.1-2, cf. 2.44.4, Strabo 10.5.7, Apollodoros Library 3.1.1), had been initially exploited by the Phoenicians. Besides its productive gold mines — combined yearly revenue of 200 to 300 talents (Herodotos 6.46.3, one talent = c. 26.2kg), the fine wine, nuts (especially chestnuts), timber (for shipbuilding), and snow white marble (construction and sculpture) of Thásos were well known in antiquity (vide Aristophanes Ekklesiazusai 1119-20, Aulus Gellius Attic Nights 6.16.1). The Athenian soldier statesman Thucydides tells us (4.105.1) he grew rich through possessing the right of working the gold mines in that part of the world.

[4] Archilochos fr. 21. Thásos features heavily in Archilochos’ poetry, and he describes it on several occasions (cf. frr. 102, 163, 228), and Swift (2019: 246) suggests a single original poem here.

[5] Archilochos fr. 93 West, cf. fr. 93a Swift.

[6] Archilochos frr. 89, 94.

[7]  That Archilochos is a voice from the mercenary ranks is a matter of fierce debate. Hence I must attend to the so-called Autobiographical Fallacy and thus meet the possible criticism of those who see Archilochos’ poetry as literary fiction. The question whether Archilochos was speaking autobiographically or assuming a persona other than his own is unanswerable. For me, as a historian, it is also unimportant. Generally speaking, when a poet adopts a persona, he judges that his audience will find it interesting and effective. Its veracity as autobiography is unknowable; its value as evidence for social history is unimpaired.

^[8] The name Ένυάλιος was specifically used as an epithet joined with Ares, and frequently occurs in the Iliad that Ares can be omitted as understood (2.651, 7.166, 8.264, 13.519, 17.211, 259, 18.309, 20.69, 22.132). In the Anabasis (1.8.18, cf. 5.2.14), Xenophon mentions the Greek mercenaries raise a war cry to Ένυάλιος as they charge the Persian army at the battle of Koúnaxa.

[9] Archilochos fr. 110. Erxies is mentioned in a couple of other poems offering military advice (frs. 88, 89). Swift (2019: 276) views Erxies as a Parian leader rather than a god or hero suggested by Martin L. West (Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus [Berlin, 1974], p. 126).

^[10] Archilochos fr. 2. Ismaros was a polis on the Thracian coast not far from the off-shore island of Thásos. Its wines are referred to by Homer (Odyssey 9.39, 198 Fagles).

[11] Barley was usually eaten in the form of an unleavened ‘kneaded thing’ (māza) rather than leavened bread (e.g. Archilochos fr. 2, Aristophanes Wasps 610, Knights 55, Ekklesiazusai 606, Antiphanes 226, [Homer] Epigrammata 15.6, Thucydides 4.16.1). A flick through Xenophon’s Anabasis will reveal that the Ten Thousand dined a great deal of the time on barley-meal (e.g. 4.5.26, 5.3.9, 6.1.15, 2.3, 5.1, 7.1.37, cf. Thucydides 8.100.2, Aristophanes Knights 1359). Having roasted and milled his barley grain, the campaigning soldier took his flour and kneaded it up with a little water, maybe olive oil and sour wine too, using a square of sheepskin as a kneading-trough, to produce a simple form of bread (Thucydides 3.49.3, Xenophon Kúrou paideía 6.2.28, Hermippos fr. 57 Kock). The fresh dough was rolled into wafer thin strips then baked quickly. The soldier would usually do this by twisting a strip around a stick and baking it the hot ashes of his campfire. It must be said that the preparation and consumption of food gives a texture to the gruelling days on campaign, providing those little mental inducements which enable men to blunt the discomforts of the moments by looking forward to something as mundane as unleavened bread and local wine, and gives a focus for the little communities, gathered round a campfire.

^[12] Desiderius Erasmus, ‘The soldier and the Carthusian’, Colloquies [1518] vol. 1, §§ 5383-5.

^[13] Archilochos fr. 302 West, cf. fr. 302 Swift.

[14] Ibid. fr. 42.

^[15] Odyssey 9.219 Fagles. According to Odysseus, Ismaric is so divinely potent that to one cup of it are mixed ‘twenty cups of water’ (ibid. 9.232 Fagles). A powerful wine indeed, though the ancient Greeks habitually drank their wine diluted with water, the usual proportions of water to wine being 3:1, 5:3, or 3:2. Drinking straight wine was seen as uncivilised, the kind of behaviour their barbaric neighbours would indulge in. The Greeks called the practice ‘drinking Skythian style’. They believed that drinking neat wine was not only uncouth, but that the practice was also unsafe, potentially leading to madness.

^[16] Ardent du Picq, Battle Studies (Harrisburg PA, 1946), p. 118.

^[17] Archilochos fr. 128.

^[18] Ibid. fr. 5, cf. fr. 139.

[19] Thucydides 5.71.1, Plutarch Moralia 220a.

[20] Plato (Laws 12.943e-945a) thinks the issue important enough to require legislation. In Athens, at least, a law called for the loss of political rights for a citizen who threw away his aspís to flee from battle (Andokides 1.74, Lysias 10.1); and the charge was taken so seriously that to assert that a citizen was a rhípsaspia was an actionable slander (Lysias 10.9).

^[21] Plutarch Instituta Laconica § 34.

^[22] Ibid. Moralia 241f 16.

[23] Kritias apud Aelianus Natural History 10.13.

[24] Archilochos fr. 24 Edmonds, contra Swift fr. 216, who confuses the issue concerning Karians and their notoriety as mercenaries in the Archaic period. Ephoros of Kyme (FGrHist 70 F 12) believed that the Karians were the first foreign mercenary fighters to serve for payment; they certainly make an appearance as such in the Bible (2 Kings 11:4). Non-Hellenic Karia had a wide reputation as a supplier of hoplite mercenaries, particularly to the Saite dynasty of Egypt (Herodotos 2.152, Plato Laches 187b, Diodoros 1.66.12, Strabo 14.2.28, Aelianus Natural History 12.30, Plutarch Moralia 302a, cf. Polybios 10.32.11) who hired themselves out to go in harm’s way, so risking their necks for the sake of others by doing their ‘dirty work’ for them. For the Greek term epíkouros = mercenary, see Nic Fields, ‘Apollo: God of War, Protector of Mercenaries’, in K.A. Sheedy (ed.), Archaeology in the Peloponnese: New Excavations and Research (Oxford, 1996), pp. 95-113.

[25] E.g. Archilochos frr. 125, 236.

[26] Urs Graf served in numerous military campaigns in northern Italy and Burgundy involving Swiss mercenaries marching under their cantonal banners, and he is documented being present at the battles of Novara (1513) and Marignano (1515), and probably took part in the sack of Rome (1527). He was known for his violent nature and often found himself in trouble with the legal authorities for abusing his wife and consorting with prostitutes, culminating in an accusation of attempted murder which caused him to flee Basel in 1518. A goldsmith and engraver too, today he is best known for his pen and black ink drawings and woodcuts. More attracted by vice than virtue, he held up a mirror to the foibles and failings of his contemporaries: his favourite subjects were his fellow campaigning mercenaries and immodestly dressed young ladies of easy virtue. The Swiss Confederacy at the time was a culture of mercenary warfare, its soldiers remarkable both because of the terror they inspired in their opponents, and for their own extraordinary martial qualities. Women travelled with the cantonal columns, earning meagre money as foragers, cooks, servants, or sex workers.

[27] E.g. Archilochos frr. 119, 193, 196, 196a.

By Kevin Wright

‘The brave ones shoot bullets, the crazy ones shoot film’

(Joe Longo, World War Two USAAF motion picture cameraman)

Photographic and film images are a powerful language, and those from wartime are even more so. In the run-up to the attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941, the Combat Cameramen of the United States Army Air Forces began harnessing the power of still and moving imagery to record its accomplishments for technical, organisational, and news purposes.

They have documented combat actions, captured historic events, recorded the development and testing of ever more sophisticated weapon systems, produced training films, and recorded almost every aspect of US Air Force life ever since. Combat Camera is the first book to try to assemble some of this remarkable history.

Productions like Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress and The Last Bomb, which followed B-29 missions over Japan, were widely distributed, received much acclaim, and were later reinvented by Hollywood. However, the vast majority of their often classified work was for the Pentagon’s eyes only. The main task was to keep senior Air Force commanders and political decision-makers informed of current activities and record the challenges faced by the Air Force in the air and on the ground.

In recent years, through detailed research into US aerial reconnaissance operations during the Cold War, and my own experiences in air-to-air photography, I have met many of these accomplished US Air Force photographers and camera operators. Even with my limited experience of air-to-air photography with modern digital cameras, ‘getting the shot’ remains a very demanding task. Positioning your subject while bouncing around in an accompanying aircraft, getting the light and backdrop right all prove challenging. But imagine doing that with much simpler equipment and someone firing back at you, trying to shoot you down?

It was reading about and talking with some of these professionals, current and retired, that sparked my interest in learning more about their professional lives. Individuals like Doug Morrell, a USAAF cameraman who was partially colourblind, but this enabled him to see through enemy attempts to camouflage factories and submarines that everyone else had missed. He went on to be shot down twice in raids on Ploesti during World War II and later, again, in Vietnam, where he was rescued from Viet Cong troops hunting him down. There was Dan McGovern, who took the first camera crews to the sites of the first atomic weapon attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and whose extensive film documentary work was security classified for many years to keep it out of public view.

Through talking to the men, and now women, involved in tasks such as recording bomb damage over Vietnam, documenting the 1989 Panama invasion and capture of Manuel Noriega, recording the events of the 1991 Gulf War, and some of Saddam Hussein’s war crimes. The book captures more contemporary experiences. In between there were the highs and lows, including: the Korean War, intelligence-related work, nuclear tests, and documenting the development of USAF Strategic Air Command and its nuclear missile forces.   

Writing about  just some of these events has proved fascinating and provided a unique insight into life in the US Air Force. By using QR codes, Combat Camera also provides direct access to much of this rarely seen film and video imagery, which is gradually being declassified and digitised by public and private bodies for public access.

When we think of the First World War, we tend to picture mud, trenches, and endless columns of horses hauling wagons through rutted roads. Yet behind the wire and the guns another revolution was taking place — the rise of the motor vehicle as an instrument of modern warfare. Trucks, motorcycles, and mechanical tractors began to transform how armies moved, supplied, and fought.

In Imperial German Army Motorised Troops 1914–18, Volume 1: Origins, Organisation and Mechanical Innovation in the Great War, Jacek Zabielski uncovers this neglected dimension of the conflict. Drawing on German-language archives and hundreds of rare photographs, he traces how the Imperial Army developed one of the world’s first organised military motor services — the Kraftfahrtruppen — and how these early motorised formations helped carry the Kaiser’s armies across Europe.

From steam to petrol — and from experiment to necessity

Zabielski begins his account in the nineteenth century, when the Prussian army’s pioneering Verkehrstruppen (transport troops) managed the empire’s railways and experimented with mechanical traction. Steam road locomotives by Fowler and later Krupp were tested as artillery tractors during the Franco-Prussian War, hauling heavy guns through the siege lines around Paris. By the early 1900s, the Prussian Ministry of War had established a Selbstfahrer-Kommando — literally a “self-driving command” — at Tempelhof, where the first motorised troops trained with Daimler and Büssing lorries.

The shift from horse to engine was neither quick nor smooth. Early military vehicles struggled with poor roads, fragile tyres, and limited fuel supplies. But the advantages were undeniable. A truck could carry the same load as a dozen wagons and cover the distance in a fraction of the time. By 1912, Germany’s Kraftfahrtruppen were becoming a serious logistical arm, supported by the new Artillerie-Prüfungs-Kommission (Artillery Test Commission) and Verkehrstechnische-Prüfungs-Kommission (Transport Technology Evaluation Commission), which set technical standards for army vehicles and tested designs from Daimler, NAG, and Siemens.

The German government also introduced a state vehicle-subsidy scheme, granting financial incentives to civilians who purchased trucks meeting military specifications. In return, these lorries could be requisitioned on mobilisation. By 1914, more than 800 subsidised trucks were registered — an early form of what we might now call “dual-use” technology policy.

1914 – The first motorised war

At the outbreak of war in August 1914, the Imperial Army mobilised about 1,700 military-grade lorries, plus thousands of civilian vehicles requisitioned under the subsidy system. Each field army was assigned Etappen-Kraftwagen-Kolonnen (rear-echelon motor transport columns), supported by depots, repair parks, and staff car pools. In addition, new formations such as Sanitäts-Kraftwagen-Abteilungen (motorised ambulance units) and Post-Kraftwagen-Parks (postal transport detachments) kept the front supplied, fed, and connected.

The book vividly describes how these ad-hoc units grew into a sophisticated logistical network. Early campaigns in Belgium and northern France exposed the limits of horse-drawn supply; roads churned into morasses of mud, and the armies soon depended on trucks to bridge the gap between the railheads and the front. By 1915 the number of military lorries exceeded 10,000 — an astonishing figure for the period.

Zabielski reconstructs how this network functioned: motor columns carrying ammunition and food; field workshops maintaining vehicles under fire; and Feldpost trucks hauling billions of letters to and from the front — twelve billion pieces of mail over four years, a feat of industrial logistics as remarkable as any battle.

The people behind the machines

What makes Imperial German Army Motorised Troops so compelling is the human dimension woven through the technical detail. The photographs — many published for the first time — show proud young drivers in leather Litewka tunics posing beside their trucks, or squinting through goggles from the seats of Wanderer and NSU motorcycles. Others capture the everyday hazards of the new technology: broken axles, bogged-down lorries, and improvised roadside repairs.

Zabielski’s research also reveals the social side of early motoring in uniform. Pre-war officers joined the Kaiserlicher Automobil-Club, whose members were granted reserve commissions if they could provide their own vehicles. The club’s insignia — the imperial eagle within a bronze circle — adorned many of the staff cars seen on the roads of occupied France and Poland.

He also charts the creation of volunteer and specialist detachments: ambulance units staffed by civilians, the Freiwilligen-Automobil-Korps (Volunteer Automobile Corps), and even field chapels mounted on trucks. By war’s end, the motor troops had evolved into a complex organisation under the Chef des Feldkraftfahrwesens (Chief of Field Motor Vehicles), reporting directly to the Quartermaster-General.

Engines of artillery and industry

A substantial section of the book examines the use of heavy motor traction for artillery. Steam and benzene-powered tractors such as the Büssing K.W.Z. 1800 and Krupp-Daimler K.D.I hauled the army’s heaviest howitzers — including the 21 cm Mörser and 42 cm Gamma-Mörser* — across shattered roads. These machines were the direct ancestors of inter-war and Second World War military trucks and half-tracks.

The accompanying colour plates by David Bocquelet bring these behemoths to life in their late-war camouflage of Feldgrau, Ocker, Braun, and Rotbraun, alongside more modest but equally vital vehicles — the Podeus LIII, Opel 3-tonner, and Mercedes staff cars of Marinekorps Flandern. The artwork highlights the diversity of markings and colours, from the Prussian Reichsadler to the blue-and-white arms of Bavaria.

Innovation and legacy

By 1918, the Kraftfahrtruppen had become indispensable. Every German field army operated its own Armee-Kraftwagen-Kolonnen, while divisional motor columns, fuel trucks, and mobile workshops kept the war machine moving. The book’s detailed organisational charts and appendices trace this evolution with scholarly precision, providing an invaluable reference for historians and modellers alike.

Yet the story does not end with the Armistice. Zabielski shows how the wartime experience of motorised transport laid the foundations for inter-war developments — from Reichswehr logistics to the armoured forces of the 1930s. The humble truck, once an auxiliary tool, had proven itself a weapon of strategic significance.

A landmark study of early military motorisation

Imperial German Army Motorised Troops 1914–18, Volume 1 combines meticulous technical research with human stories and superb visual presentation. It is richly illustrated throughout with rare archival photos and specially commissioned full-colour artwork, making it both a reference and a visual history.

For readers of Helion’s @War and Military Technology series, it opens an entirely new window onto the First World War — one that shifts our focus from the trenches to the supply parks, from the horses to the engines that kept the German army in motion.

Volume 1 lays the foundation for the next instalment, which will follow the motor troops into the later war years and examine the dawn of mechanised warfare itself.

By Andrew Abram

My latest research project assesses the role of garrison warfare, garrison composition, logistics, financing, arming and clothing of a selection of civil-war garrisons. As such, muster rolls and pay warrants provide much information about the make-up and payment of military units, albeit they mainly survive from 1645-46. Recent studies not only illustrate that ‘Siege warfare is often the forgotten aspect of the English Civil War’ but locate common aspects of the conflict in particular geographical regions. Hence, the primary focus of my work covers the Warwickshire area of the Midlands, the Thames Valley, and the county of Cheshire.

Military studies of the British Civil Wars (1638-1653) have tended to concentrate on battles, campaigns, sieges, and field armies to the exclusion of the role, organization, and composition of garrisons, as well as garrison warfare. Some writers have interpreted events enacted on the battlefield as being more significant than anything else in determining the outcome of the conflict. This fails to reflect, however, the main aspects of the conflict, as the most typical forms of combat and military activity – rather than set-piece battles and skirmishes – involved sieges and garrisons. Except perhaps for the formation of the New Model Army in 1645, large quantities of troops and military resources went into the garrisoning of cities, towns and ports (such as Reading and Liverpool), while the provisioning and supply of these garrisons often strained local civilian populations on whom taxes and other resources were levied.

The ‘traditional’ approach to battlefield conflict, as outlined above, is challenged by Ronald Hutton and Wylie Reeves, who see the main characteristic feature of the wars as being ‘the assault on a stronghold or fortification’. Conversely, Malcolm Wanklyn interprets events enacted on the battlefield as being more significant than anything else in determining the outcome of the conflict. One reason for such neglect by historians – as pointed out by authors such as Andrew Hopper in his work on the papers of the Hotham governors of Hull during the Civil War, and Ian Atherton in his study of the Royalist garrison of Lichfield – is that relatively few garrison accounts having survived in manuscript form. With some notable exceptions, fewer still have found their way into print.

Troops from garrisons also supported other forces, whereas urban centres often controlled trade and movement by dominating the hinterland between transportation routes and other areas of military operations. It was the Earl of Clarendon who reported that when Royalist ammunition convoys were forced to pass through regions sympathetic to Parliament in 1642-3, ‘the enemy was much superior in all the counties between Yorkshire and Oxford and had planted garrisons so near all the roads that the most private messengers travelled with great hazard, three being intercepted for one that escaped’. Additionally, as centres of intelligence networks, the importance of which increased as the conflict progressed.

One reason for the general neglect by historians of studies of garrisons and garrison warfare is a supposedly paucity of surviving garrison accounts in manuscript form, and with some notable exceptions, fewer still have found their way into print. Nevertheless, comprehensive and detailed accounts for some major Parliamentarian garrisons survive (mainly in The National Archives and British Library). These include Warwickshire (including Warwick, Coventry, and Kenilworth); Yorkshire (such as Hull and Beverley; in addition to the Thames Valley in the form of Reading and Windsor. Owing partly to a more general lack of surviving records, Royalist garrisons such as Reading, Lichfield and Chester provide adequate material upon which to make a valid study. These, like their Parliamentarian counterparts, provide a valuable insight into the life, composition, strength, funding and logistics of civil-war garrison life.

Unlike at Windsor, which had medieval castles and walls, there few fortifications at Reading before hostilities began. In December 1642 its newly appointed Royalist Governor, Sir Arthur Aston used forced civilian labour alongside his soldiers and began the construction of a defensive line of ditches with a raised earthen rampart stretching between a series of bastions or redoubts. These were were located at Castle Hill, Greyfriars, Abbey Bridge, and Whitley Hill on the southwestern Berkshire bank of the river. Parliamentarian accounts of the siege of the town in April 1643 mention that the town was ‘a place strongly fortified, with a deep ditch around, and strong works near and remote, he marched a compass of seven miles extraordinary, as if he had intended Oxford, by means which he got the west and weakest side of the town, and possessed himself of a hedge and ditch’, and ‘we made our approaches that night, taking some advantages of the hedges and ditches unslighted by the enemy’. By comparison, Thomas Dennis, who had been elected mayor the previous September, was employed in ‘exchanging that part of the fortification which was allotted to the city of Oxford’. He also provided tools and shovels for the work, issued warrants to press workmen, paid them for their labour, contracted for timber and other materials, and levied the recruitment of soldiers in the garrison.

By Philippe Richardot

The first volume was dealing with hierarchy, military role of the emperors, presentation of the major generals of the period, Rangordnung (ranks), and Romano-Byzantine army organization. Volume 2 deals with the logistics, intelligence and mainly the fighting. As the Roman did, the early Byzantines mastered moves on long ranges. More than 3,000 kilometres (1,912 miles) separate the outpost of Dara on the Persian frontier and the fortress in Thamugadi, today Timgad in Algeria. Even today few armies can do this. But the Romano-Byzantines were able to maintain this vast space within their operational capacities. So their logistics, land and sea, is under scrutiny in a new approach. The way they prepared a military campaign too. The early Byzantine military machine was a naval power but not in the sense we generally imagine. Merchantships and warships were by then evolving. The war at sea was no more the old Roman way and not again the Byzantine style used later against Arab invaders. The question of the so-called “Greek fire” is precisely debated in the time lapse studied in this book to avoid any anachronism and the frequent errors about it. Nevertheless, land weaponry, tactics, sieges and battles are the main focus here. A new model of army progressively emerged throughout the 6^th century with a complex mix of tradition and innovation. Adaptation was the moto and not uniformization. Some sketches and a detailed text, with narrative of battles intend to explain this.

First please consider this sketch from Etienne Le Baube, of a mid or late sixth-century heavy infantry man:

This soldier is wearing an iron chain mail over a leather subarmalis whose pteruges (bands) are visible on the thighs. Sometimes pteruges cover the upper arms. The wide pants are from barbarian origin but werein use in Romano-Byzantine army after the Cathedra of Archbishop Maximian of Ravenna (545-553). The design of the shield is inspired from the Sixth-Century ivory pyxis showing the Martyre of St Menas, British Museum, London, inventory number 1879,1220. In both representations, the soldiers wear scale armour with pteruges and a stylized visored helmed. Instead a Leiden-Type segmented helmet was preferred to this Hellenistic-like art convention. Shield’s colours are inspired from the Coptic church of Deir Abu Hennis in the old village of Antinoa has frescoes dating from late Sixth to early Seventh Century. The belt is from late Roman inspiration.

The second figure is a courtesy of the reenactment group The Numerus Invictorum and change our mind in viewing the Romano-Byzantine soldier in Justinianic times.

The man is equipped for velitatio, guerrilla warfare. He is topped by a pileus pannonicus mentioned by Vegetius and worn by soldiers and civilian from the late Third Century to the Fifth and may be thereafter. He wears a dark blue kandys on a white linen shirt. Original samples found in Antinoe, Egypt, were turquoise blue, maybe discolored. From Persian and Sassanid origin, the kandys is assumed to be a riding coat with overlong sleeves. It was a male and female and even a children clothing. A hole at the elbow crease allowed the forearm to be used conveniently.

This one by Renato Dalmasso look the adaptation to Near-East context:

Seventh Century infantryman from Syria. A leather subalare babylonicum (Babylonian harness) keeps his chainmail stable on his white subarmalis, sort of buff coat with pteruges/pteryges. There is not classicizing and esthetical effects like in the silver Cyprus plates. After a lost Syrian mosaic showing the fight between David and Goliath, a recurrent theme in early Byzantine art.

By Frank Riess

The life of Obadiah, a Norman who converted to Judaism in the twelfth century, is not well known to a general readership. I first encountered Obadiah when I was researching my previous book on Bodo, a Frankish monk who also embraced the Jewish faith in the 830s. Obadiah’s story was so compelling that I immediately began to investigate his background.

At the time of writing the first draft in 2020 I was unable to travel to his birthplace in Southern Italy due to the pandemic and the risks associated with Covid which were especially serious in the part of Italy I wished to visit. I also needed to make use of various libraries which were closed, but these proved very helpful in supplying books by mail: at one point the London Library generously sent a package of 20 books to my home free of charge. This was repeated on several occasions. Other libraries also furnished emails with information at my request.

The life of Obadiah appears to be a singular journey from his birthplace in Italy to the Middle East at the time of the Crusades and a critique of his time. But the placing of his life at the centre of a story felt to me, on occasion, to be something of an artifice. This is because someone is born, lives and dies, but this biographical perspective organises history around a developing and foreseeable progression. The details of Obadiah’s life are also fragmentary, and it could be argued that the ‘individual’ in the modern sense had not yet been uncovered in the Middle Ages.

On the other hand, the major source that I was able to rely on was a unique account of his life written by himself. This surviving text, however scanty is a precious document. For all this, it was a challenge to attain the insight and depth of a modern biography when we lack the enormous sources and psychological perspective of modern times. In the end, the story is constructed around several broad strands of politics and religious beliefs seeking to situate Obadiah in a context. I tried to answer these important questions following Obadiah’s footsteps, mindful of the fact that that I had to be prepared to be side-tracked and look at possible details of his life that skirted close to imagination, even fiction.

The events that shaped the experience of Obadiah constitute a small moment in the unfolding dialogue between the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, still waiting to be fully clarified. Some of the issues have a relevance even today.  

By Laurence Burrows

‘the art of war consists of ambushing and surprising our enemies, and in preventing them from ambushing and surprising ourselves.’ – Tecaughrentanego, a Kahnawake Mohawk

Between 1755 and 1759, Indigenous war parties undertook frequent missions, often on behalf of their French allies, between Fort Carillon on the southern end of Lake Champlain and Fort Edward south of Lake George on the Hudson River. My new book War on the Back of the Turtle: Indigenous Peoples in the Period of the Seven Years War, 1752-1766 details these actions and in other theatres in the eastern woodlands of North America, and includes information on the actual tactics employed, dress and other contemporaneous aspects, all of which are often misportrayed in movies and other media.

One such raid on 18 July 1757, less than two weeks before Montcalm and the French began the siege of Fort William Henry, some 300 warriors and at least one woman of the Menominee nation (‘Wild Rice People,’ whose sovereign territory was centred on Green Bay on the northwest side of Lake Michigan), with a handful of Ojibwe and Mohawk guides, went out from Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga) with Lieutenant Joseph Marin and 80 Troupes de la Marine and miliciens to scout the area between Forts William Henry and Edward. Beaching their canoes at South Bay, they travelled undetected overland south and set up camp in the ruins of Fort Anne on Wood Creek. The following day, small scouting parties were sent out. One party of eight Menominees ran into a patrol of 30 rangers and Massachusetts provincials. The Massachusetts officer was killed, and the rest fled back to Fort Edward. Shortly after Marin sent 100 men back to Carillon, as the miliciens lacked shoes and supplies.

Three days later, following an invocation, the Menominee force advanced towards Fort Edward. Arriving at 8:00 a.m. on the edge of an area of recently felled trees to the east of the fort, their captains and Marin ordered half of their men back to a hilltop and the rest to a thickly wooded swamp. An hour later, through the sunlit foliage, they saw woodcutters arrive, guarded by 80 provincial soldiers who were split up into detachments of between six and 12 as sentry parties and sent marching in beats through the woods. Meanwhile, the Menominees slipped forward unseen, notching arrows into their bowstrings. One guard was silently dispatched near the swamp. Another, a blur of an arrow passing by his head, realised what was happening and shouted a warning. As the sentries took cover, the Menominees opened up with their fusils, whilst other warriors manoeuvred to form a half-moon around them. The provincial soldiers, cowering or panicking, were then ordered to withdraw quickly. Charging after them, the Menominees overran the stragglers and, on reaching the edge of the woods, took cover behind trees.

In front of them was a relief force of Massachusetts provincials coming from Fort Edward beyond. After a firefight lasting five minutes and realising they were outnumbered, the Menominee captains and Marin ordered a fighting withdrawal to avoid being overwhelmed. They retreated even further as Putnam’s Rangers arrived and charged toward them. Falling back and in danger of being caught, they were compelled to knock their prisoners on the head, except for one, who was claimed by a Menominee woman. The rangers were finally kept at bay by a detachment of warriors who – not wishing to pause to reload their fusils – relied on bows and arrows. Despite the pursuit, the Menominees suffered only two men slightly wounded, with just one Marine officer killed in the encounter, whilst the provincials had lost 13 men killed and scalped or missing, two wounded, and one captured. The Menominee party arrived safely back at Fort Carillon on the morning of the 24th. 

By Kevin Wright

The 1980s Royal Observer Corps training manual contained a short history of the organisation. This included a description of how Major General Edward Bailey Ashmore organised the ‘London Air Defence Area’ to help protect the city from German aerial attack during World War I. And from that, the Observer Corps was formed in 1925. In reality, of course, history was not nearly that simple or linear as the training manual suggested.

In 2025, the ROC celebrated its centenary. As a former member, the anniversary sparked my interest in exploring that history in far greater depth, including many hours spent searching official records at the National Archives at Kew. Totally engrossing, the first stage of that research is now available as Skywatch, A History of the Royal Observer Corps. This first volume examines the origins, formation, and development of the Observer Corps from the First World War through September 1939, the very eve of World War II. It attempts  to fill in the many gaps and explore new material, absent from official histories.

A New Form of Defence

The Metropolitan Observation Service was established by the London County Council in October 1914 at the start of the Great War, with 24 main reporting posts placed around the capital. However, the main defences were not nearly so well organised. Following the political crises provoked by successful German bombing raids on the capital during 1917, Maj General Ashmore was urgently appointed to strengthen London’s defences. He began coordinating a whole host of elements, including the RFC’s fighter aircraft, anti-aircraft gun and searchlight units, and even a balloon-mounted anti-zeppelin ‘apron’. Brought  under the auspices of the London Air Defence Area, all these elements began to work under Ashmore’s direction from a central operations room at Horse Guards in central London.   

With the end of the Great War, all those defensive measures rapidly disappeared. However, in the 1920s, widespread fears about the awesome destructive potential of aerial bombing, even in the absence of a clear enemy, prompted official efforts, again led by Ashmore, to consider the necessity of creating an effective air defence system. At its core was the need to detect approaching enemy aircraft to enable coordination of air defences and to warn the public. In 1924, a small-scale experiment tested the feasibility of his ideas for a defensive aircraft reporting organisation. Successful, the concept took tangible form in 1925 with the formation of the Observer Corps.

The first two ‘Groups’ were established in the South East of England and consisted of a network of ‘Posts’ organised in groups of three that reported to a ‘Centre.’ By telephone, they passed details of the bearing and altitude of aircraft in their area, using a specially designed ‘Post Instrument’, which, at its simplest, was a practical application of trigonometry.

A careful examination of the official records reveals the Corps’ hybrid origins. Responsibility fell to local Chief Constables, under Home Office direction, but was organised for the benefit of the War Office, then later transferred to the Air Ministry. The arrangement was inspired. Local constabularies were the only feasible way to raise and manage a part-time body of men, most of whom were based in widely dispersed rural communities. Members of this secretive organisation were sworn in as Special Constables, with a ‘Head Special’ in charge of each Post.

The Growing Threat

At variance with some original official accounts, my recent research charts the Observer Corps’s piecemeal growth, showing that even as greater urgency was attached to expansion, it often remained dogged by official indecision.

Appointed as the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief of the newly created Fighter Command in 1936, RAF Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding brought an enhanced urgency. He recognised the value of the Corps as the only way to track aircraft once they had passed over the coast. Experiments in sound detection added little extra warning, and even with the possibilities provided by the breakneck development of the new ‘Radio Direction Finding’ (radar) technology, the Observer Corps remained the only feasible method of overland tracking and reporting. Indeed, if the RDF network failed, it was the only means of detecting enemy aircraft. 

Over the next few years, Dowding worked ceaselessly against official inertia, and with insufficient resources, to create the world’s first fully integrated air defence system. The Corps expanded rapidly in a series of urgent expansions. During increasingly frequent RAF air defence exercises, Observer Corps posts would pop up, active for a few hours at a time, in remote fields and atop tall buildings in towns and cities across Britain. Each post reported to a ‘Centre,’ where other Observers plotted aircraft movements on large map tables, with the details passed to RAF Sector Controls and Fighter Command. The Centres were often squeezed into small, unsuitable spaces in major town telephone exchanges. The premises were often very  uncomfortable and provided little protection in the event of an air attack. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, technicians at the General Post Office struggled to keep pace with the ever-growing needs of the RAF and the Observer Corps for a robust communications infrastructure.

Observers came from all walks of life, all social classes and every conceivable occupation to work together. Against official rejections, some individuals’ requests to  join the Observer Corps even reached the Prime Minister. The Observers’ volunteer spirit often triumphed, despite their enthusiasm often being trampled and their welfare being neglected by the government departments they served. By 1938, as war with Germany looked unavoidable, even more stepped up to serve. Their dedication was tested when they were briefly mobilised during the Munich crisis. For those few days, the Corps was brought to readiness, in the vanguard of the nation’s defences, ready, if as was expected, the Germans launched a massive pre-emptive air attack on the country to deliver a ‘knockout blow’ if war broke out.

While the Munich crisis soon passed, the brief mobilisation exposed many weaknesses in the nation’s defences, including those of the Observer Corps. In 1939, the tempo of RAF air exercises accelerated, new Corps Groups formed, the RDF network began to operate nearly round-the-clock, and the country’s preparations became ever more extensive as the prospect of war drew closer.

The second volume follows the fortunes of the Royal Observer Corps during World War II. It is already completed and set for publication in late 2026. Work on the third and final volume has begun. This last book focuses on the post war period, detailing how the ROC became a nuclear reporting organisation during the dangerous years of the Cold War.

The Forgotten Aviators of the World’s Worst Nuclear Disaster

When most people think of the Chernobyl disaster, they picture graphite-strewn roofs, firefighters battling radioactive flames, and a ghost city frozen in time. What is less commonly remembered is that one of the largest emergency aviation operations in Soviet history unfolded over the smouldering ruins of Reactor 4. Helicopter crews—military and civilian—flew hundreds of missions in conditions unlike anything aviators had ever faced.

Krzysztof Dabrowski’s new volume in Helion’s Europe@War series, Airmen of Chernobyl: Aviation and the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster, 1986, tells this story in full for the first time. It restores the helicopter pilots, aircrews, and support staff to the centre of the narrative—men who flew into radiation levels so intense they caused the air itself to glow, as captured in the description from the book’s foreword.

The First Flights into the Unknown

At 08:00 on 26 April 1986—barely hours after the explosions—an Mi-8 from the Kiev Military District lifted off with Captain Sergei Volodin and his crew aboard. They believed they were heading to a routine fire response. Instead, as the helicopter approached the stricken plant, their instruments began to climb from 25 R/h to 500 R/h before going off the scale entirely.

These first reconnaissance flights were conducted without protective gear—the crew’s dosimeters were defective, and the seriousness of the event was not yet understood. By evening they had produced the first aerial documentation of the devastated reactor, footage that would shape the Soviet Union’s understanding of what had happened.

Aerial Firefighting on an Unimaginable Scale

By 27 April the scale of the crisis was clear. As Dabrowski describes, at peak intensity some 30–40 helicopters were in the air simultaneously, flying a constant two-minute cycle over the reactor. Mi-8s, Mi-6s, and (later) the powerful Mi-26 worked in near-continuous rotation, dropping thousands of tonnes of sand, lead, boron carbide, dolomite, and clay directly into the ruined core.

The statistics tell their own story: between 27 April and 10 May, Soviet helicopters flew roughly 1,800 sorties and delivered around 5,000 tonnes of materials into Unit 4.

Hovering over the reactor was impossible—the heat plume destabilised the aircraft and the radiation dose was lethal—so all drops were made in forward flight. Subsequent analysis revealed that many loads missed by several metres, falling onto roofs, service buildings, or into open voids. But the alternative—doing nothing—was unthinkable.

Mi-24R: A Helicopter Designed for Nuclear Battlefields

One of the most striking aspects of the book is its coverage of the Mi-24R, a radiological-chemical reconnaissance variant of the famous Hind gunship. Several of these were deployed to Chernobyl, identifiable by the distinctive sample-collection arms mounted under their stub wings (profiles shown in the colour plates section of the book.

The Mi-24R was equipped to take soil samples, detect contamination, and mark irradiated terrain—all roles originally intended for a nuclear battlefield. At Chernobyl, these aircraft finally operated in the environment for which they had been designed, their crews absorbing significant long-term radiation doses in the process.

The Most Dangerous Mission of All: Lowering the Needle

Some missions bordered on the suicidal. To measure temperature and radiation levels inside the reactor itself, a 200 kg instrument pod—suspended on a 300 m cable—had to be lowered directly into the shattered core.

On 9 and 10 May 1986, Colonel Volkozubov’s Mi-8 crew performed these insertions, spending over six minutes hovering above the open reactor—an environment so radioactive that the helicopter was later written off as contaminated scrap.

Later, in June, test pilot Mykola Melnyk used a Kamov helicopter to drop the famous 18-metre steel “needle” probe into the ruins, allowing continuous monitoring from within. He flew 46 missions between May and September, developing the radiation-related illnesses that ultimately contributed to his death in 2013.

Disaster Within a Disaster: The 2 October 1986 Crash

Dabrowski also recounts the only fatal aviation accident of the response. On 2 October 1986, with the sarcophagus nearing completion, an Mi-8’s rotor clipped a crane cable and the helicopter spiralled into the ground—footage captured by Soviet cameraman Viktor Grebenyuk (dramatic stills appear in the book’s photographic section).

All four crewmen—veterans of Afghanistan—were killed instantly. Had the aircraft come down a few metres to the side, it would have crashed onto the roof of Unit 3, potentially causing a second nuclear disaster.

Beyond Firefighting: Cloud Seeding, Mapping, and Decontamination

Aviation’s role went far beyond dropping sand into the crater:

• Cloud seeding by Tu-16 “Cyclone” aircraft prevented radioactive rain from falling on major Soviet cities
• An-24RR and An-30 reconnaissance aircraft flew 285 sorties in the first 90 days, collecting 600 air samples.
• Mi-2s and An-2s sprayed zeolite sorbents across fields and forests to trap radionuclides.
• Mi-26s deployed vast quantities of adhesive polyvinyl acetate to “glue down” radioactive dust.

These operations, captured in colour plates and described in detail in the main text, show that the air effort extended far into the wider contaminated region, not just the reactor itself.

Why This Book Matters

Airmen of Chernobyl fills a striking gap in the historical record. The aviators’ contribution has often been reduced to a few seconds of documentary footage or a handful of photographs. Dabrowski’s research—supported throughout the book by Soviet documents, testimony, and extensive visual material—restores the scale, the technical complexity, and the human cost of their work.

The volume also demonstrates something rarely discussed: that Chernobyl was, in many ways, the closest the world has yet come to witnessing what a real nuclear battlefield would look like. The aviators flew missions originally imagined only in Cold War planning scenarios. Their experience remains profoundly relevant today.

For readers of military history, Cold War studies, aviation, or nuclear policy, Airmen of Chernobyl offers a deeply original and compelling narrative—one that finally gives these airmen their due.