“There is something to celebrate in the stubborn tenacity that has seen the country’s army out of so many near-disasters.”

By Douglas Brown

BRITAIN’S ARMIES have had a curious habit of transforming battlefield defeats into victories. Throughout the country’s history, English knights and men-at-arms, British redcoats and Tommies in khaki have often found themselves cornered, surrounded or outnumbered, yet have frequently managed to defy the odds and strike back, escape or somehow survive to fight another day. Some ridicule the British reverence for evacuations, but this listicle will show that there is something to celebrate in the stubborn tenacity that has seen the country’s army out of so many near-disasters. Here are seven such examples from the Middle Ages to the Second World War.

Agincourt – King Henry’s army gets caught with its pants down

England’s King Henry V brazenly invaded France in the summer of 1415 to press a historic claim to the throne there. Having landed with a tiny army of 11,000 men, the young ruler besieged the Normandy seaport of Harfleur. The city fell after one month, but the cost to Henry was disastrous; dysentery carried off thousands of his men, even nobles.

With his army in ruins, Henry defiantly marched his men 250 miles across France towards Calais, where they would re-cross the English Channel for home. It was a retreat, albeit an audacious one. Deep within enemy territory with just 900 men-at-arms and 5,000 archers, Henry soon ran into trouble. As supplies dwindled, the much larger pursuing French army threatened to hem his forces in “just like sheep in folds from all sides” and “overpower us, extremely few in number, exhausted by much fatigue, and feeble from going without food.”[1]After outmarching the French and crossing the River Somme, Henry found his escape route blocked by an enemy army as much as four times the size of his own. The two forces met at a little town called Agincourt.

On the morning of Oct. 25, the outnumbered English goaded their foes into making a disastrous attack. With Henry’s flanks anchored by woods, the French opted for a frontal assault across a sloppy, rain-soaked field. As the English repelled the first onslaught, the retiring French disrupted their own formations in the rear, which then struggled to advance on foot in their heavy platemail through churned-up mud, all as English longbow arrows rained down upon them. Henry’s army handily slaughtered 6,000 French soldiers in a matter of hours, while suffering less than a tenth of the losses. The English resumed their march to Calais and the young king’s victory became a national legend.

Corunna – No good deed goes unpunished

In 1807, the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte ordered his troops in Spain to conquer Portugal. Resistance quickly crumbled and the French swept through the country and soon captured the capital of Lisbon. After a year under French occupation, the Portuguese rose up and, with support from Britain, touched off what would become known as the Peninsular War. By the end of 1808, British and Portuguese troops had driven the French out. Next the government in London ordered Sir John Moore to march a British army into Spain to aid the rebellion against Napoleon that had broken out there. Moore found the Spanish armies uncoordinated and slow to offer decisive assistance; Nevertheless, he resolved to “[do] everything in our power in support of the Spanish cause.”[2]

In late 1808, the French struck back. By year’s end, Moore found himself pursued by a massive enemy army as he marched to the coast to be evacuated. Selflessly, he led his troops through the rugged Galician mountains in northwest of the country to lure the French away from Spanish and Portuguese resistance in the south. Snow, mud and ice wore down Moore’s army; soldiers marched shoeless through the freezing terrain. Discipline quickly broke down as scores of exhausted and drunken soldiers fell by the roadsides to be abandoned. Moore was appalled. “When there was a prospect of fighting the enemy, the men were then orderly, and seemed pleased, and determined to do their duty,” he said of his deteriorating troops.[3]

Moore’s 16,000 redcoats finally got the battle they wanted on Jan. 16, 1809, as he deployed his army to cover the evacuation at the port of Corunna.

French artillery inflicted grievous casualties as the fighting raged, Sir John among them. But the British infantry repulsed the attacks, and the remnants of the redcoat army were able to return to England, having lost 7,000 out of the 30,000 troops who had crossed into Spain. They would return months later fresh and ready to meet the French once more on the Iberian Peninsula.

Fuentes de Onoro – “When I get into a hole, my men pull me out of it”[4]

By May of 1811, Sir Arthur Wellesley’s second liberation of Portugal was almost complete; only the fortress town of Almeida, which sat on the border with Spain, remained in French hands. To relieve it, France’s Marshal André Masséna attacked the future Duke of Wellington at Fuentes de Onoro. After being repulsed on May 3, Masséna planned a flanking movement with 17,000 infantry and 3,500 cavalry on the Anglo-Portuguese right. Wellesley underestimated Masséna’s force and sent only the 7^th Division, 4,500-strong, to block it.

The French cut up the British outposts, and Wellesley needed to form a new position at a right angle to his old one. The 7^th Division held off the French with musketry, and the British cavalry retreated by alternate squadrons until the Light Division came to their rescue. The Light Division then fell back three miles in the face of French cavalry in a “masterpiece of military evolution.” [5] It withdrew in squares, with British cavalry among them, charging French artillery each time it tried to blast the formations to pieces. British dragoons kept their discipline as the Light Division was “retiring through [the plain] with the order and precision of a common field-day.”[6] The new position appeared so daunting the French withdrew.

Burgos – Wellesley’s worst scrape

The British army’s magnificent successes in Spain in 1812 came to a frightful end at Burgos in October. During a siege of the city, it suffered from a shortage of everything (heavy guns, ammunition, trained personnel, and even tools) against determined French resistance. When French armies gathered from throughout Spain to relieve the surrounded garrison, Wellesley had no choice but to withdraw.

The crisis worsened as torrential rains turned the roads into quagmires slowing the movement of men and the crucial supply wagons were sent back via a different route from the main body. Starving troops were forced to subsist on ox carcasses and acorns as many marched to death. The hardships exceeded those suffered during the British retreat in 1808. “Many men who had been under General Moore […] avowed they had undergone more fatigue, and suffered greater privations on the retreat from Madrid [and Burgos], than they had ever done the whole of their lives.”[7] The French, however, never risked a major battle, preferring to pick off stragglers, as the remnants of Wellesley’s army reached Portugal to recuperate. It would recover and reinvade Spain the next year and eventually march on France itself.

Mons – “Sweep aside French’s contemptible little army.”[8]

In August 1914, nearly a million German troops swept through neutral Belgium as part of the Schlieffen Plan, a massive war-winning strategy aimed at outflanking France. Rushing to the defense of its ally, Britain dispatched a small expeditionary force into Europe to help blunt the German assault. Within days of their arrival, two British corps, supported by cavalry and 300 guns, deployed themselves, directly in the path of the German army at the town of Mons. After slowing the enemy there on Aug. 23, but with the French Fifth Army suddenly withdrawing, the British Expeditionary Force embarked on a fighting retreat across Belgium.

Outnumbered by as many as six-to-one in places, the British troops unleashed what would become known as the “mad minute” of rifle fire: 15 aimed shots in 60 seconds. The Kaiser’s infantry believed they were facing massed machine guns instead of Tommies and their Lee-Enfield rifles. One eyewitness described “every bullet hitting home, sometimes taking two men at a time.”[9] Battalions, platoons, and batteries fought until overwhelmed by German infantry assault, artillery, and machine gun fire.

At Le Cateau, the II Corps under Horace Smith-Dorrien disobeyed orders and stayed to strike “a stopping blow under cover of which we could retire.”[10] Though casualties were severe, the consummate professionalism of the Tommies, coupled with mistakes by the Germans combined to allow much of the BEF escape intact, while causing troublesome delays in the very time-sensitive Schlieffen Plan, thereby robbing Germany of the decisive knockout blow that would end the First World War “before the leaves fell”[11] in 1914.

Kaiserschlacht – Germany’s 1918 Spring Offensive

In March of 1918, the Germans spotted their chance to crush the Allies and end the First World War in a single stoke. Having just made peace with Russia at Brest-Litovsk, Berlin planned to shift its vast army from the east to the Western Front and unleash a massive shattering offensive before millions of American troops could arrive in France.

Germany’s military leadership under Erich Ludendorff planned to break though the British Fifth and Third armies and capture Paris. A particularly bad winter and a shortage of manpower meant that British preparations for defense-in-depth against a German offensive were nowhere near ready.

On the morning of March 21, the Germans unleashed a five-hour, million-shell artillery barrage that included poison gas, and followed up with assaults on key points of the Allied lines with elite Stormtroopers. The attackers quickly overran much of the British forward positions and charged into the British Battle Zone. The Allies were in disarray.

As the Germans pressed the attack in the coming days, British resistance stiffened. Units held ground. Many battalions were wiped out. Some even managed counterattacks. On April 5, Ludendorff, realizing that, “the enemy’s resistance was beyond our powers,” halted the offensive.[12] The British lost 177,739 men; the Germans 239,000.

Dunkirk – “Wars are not won by evacuations.”

In mid-May 1940, Hitler launched his long-awaited assault on France. German panzers broke through the Ardennes and cut the British off from the main French armies. Trapped with their backs to the sea, the British Expeditionary Force was forced into a 30-mile perimeter around the holiday town of Dunkirk. With the German noose tightening, the Royal Navy struggled to organize a seaborne rescue of the cutoff army. An improvised fleet of vessels was assembled to carry out the evacuation. Ferries, tugboats, yachts, and an assortment of “little ships” were dispatched to Dunkirk’s beaches to collect British troops and transfer men to bigger ships like destroyers for the voyage home. The vessels had to contend with attacks by German S-boats, dive-bombers, and artillery as their helmsmen and pilots struggled through routes laid out between minefields. More than 330,000 stranded troops were taken off; only a skeleton force was left behind to man the perimeter. The German commander asked a French general captured at Dunkirk where the British had gone. “[They’re] not here,” he quipped. “They are in England.”[13]

Douglas Brown is a Texas-based writer who specializes in military history and historical fiction. His novel The Honorable Spy was released by Cheetah Publishing in July of 2022. Buy it on Amazon HERE. Follow him on Twitter @DougBrownAuthor or Instagram at douglasbrownauthor, or like his Facebook page, “Douglas Brown – Author.”

Sources:

[1] “The Chaplain,” Henrici Quinti, Angliae Regis, Gesta, ed. Benjamin Williams (London: S. & J. Bentley and Henry Fley, 1850, Google Book), 36, 40, author’s translation.

[2] Sir John Moore to Mr. John Hookham Frere, Sahagun, December 23, 1808, in James Moore, A Narrative of the Campaign of the British Army in Spain Commanded by His Excellency Lieut.-General Sir John Moore, K.B. (facsimile by Scholar Select, originally published London: John Nichols and Son, 1809), 161.

[3] Sir John Moore to Lord Castlereagh, Corunna, January 13, 1809, in James Moore, A Narrative of the Campaign of the British Army in Spain Commanded by His Excellency Lieut.-General Sir John Moore, K.B. (facsimile by Scholar Select, originally published London: John Nichols and Son, 1809), 307.

[4] Quote attributed to the Duke of Wellington, in Charles Heyman, The British Army Guide 2012-2013 (Pen and Sword, 2012, Google Book).

[5] Jonathan Leach, Life of an Old Soldier, quoted in Sir Charles Oman, A History of the Peninsular War, 4^th vol. (London: Greenhill Books, 2004), 326.

[6] John Kincaid, The Complete Kincaid of the Rifles (revised edition, Leonaur, 2011), 59.

[7] William Brown, The Narrative of a Soldier, quoted in Carole Divall, Wellington’s Worst Scrape (Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Military, 2012), 183.

[8] Orders attributed, controversially, to Kaiser Wilhelm II before the Battle of Mons.

[9] British soldier’s letter to his wife, quoted in David Lomas, Mons 1914: The BEF’s Tactical Triumph (London: Osprey Military, 1997), 40.

[10] Quoted in David Lomas, Mons 1914: The BEF’s Tactical Triumph (London: Osprey Military, 1997), 70.

[11] Kaiser Wilhelm II to his troops at the beginning of World War I.

[12] Quoted in Randal Gray, Kaiserschlacht 1918: The Final German Offensive (London: Osprey Publishing, 1991), 86.

[13] Quoted in Douglas C. Dildy, Dunkirk 1940: Operation Dynamo (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2010), 85.