Tag: Siege Warfare

Tactical Geography

[Image: A map of the Battle of Villmanstrand (1741), via George III’s Collection of Military Maps, assembled by Yolande Hodson.)

A vast collection of old military maps has been made available online through the UK’s Royal Collection Trust, taken from the collection of King George III, thanks to the exhaustive work of Yolande Hodson. While the troop positions and tactical maneuvers they document are fascinating, the maps are also a spatial survey of building types, terrains, and urban plans, including star forts, walled villages, protected natural landscape features, from bays to river valleys, and other strategic environments.

As the blog Ian Visits explains, “Maps were an important part of George’s early life and education, and he built up a huge collection of more than 55,000 topographical, maritime and military prints, drawings, maps and charts. Upon the King’s death, his son, George IV, gave his father’s collections of topographical views and maritime charts to the British Museum (now in the British Library), but retained the military plans due to their strategic value and his own keen interest in the tactics of warfare.” The new website apparently documents a mere 3,000 of those documents.

The whole thing is searchable by conflict, which means that you can look specifically for maps related to, say, the Franco-Spanish War of 1635-59, including the Siege of Cremona (1648)—seen below—or, say, the Russo-Swedish War of 1741-43, which included the Battle of Villmanstrand (1741), the image that opens this post.

[Image: A map of the Siege of Cremona (1648), via George III’s Collection of Military Maps, assembled by Yolande Hodson.)

Perhaps even better, however, you can also click on maps by region, from North America to India to, of course, all over Europe and the Caribbean. This includes, among the thousands of examples, an incredible map from the American Revolution depicting New York City in all of its topographic glory.

[Image: Long Island, New York and Staten Island (1776), via George III’s Collection of Military Maps, assembled by Yolande Hodson.)

Indeed, as Ian Visits notes, “Highlights of the collection include two-metre-wide maps of the American War of Independence. These vast maps were probably hung on purpose-made mahogany stands in Buckingham House, enabling the King to follow the steady erosion of his hold on the American colonies.”

The collection is spectacular. The Siege of Memel (1757). The Siege of Olmütz (1758). A view of Gotha (1567). The Siege of Prague (1757). I could go on and on. The Plan of Pilau (1757). The Siege of Bangalore (1791)…

Check out the guide to the online catalog, then dive in.

(Vaguely related: Feral Cities, Indirect Streets, and Soft Fortification.)

Assignment Baghdad

[Image: Screen-grab from a YouTube compilation of Desert Storm missile strikes].

In the summer of 2016, I heard an incredible story from a retired Defense Intelligence Agency analyst. It combined architectural history, international espionage, an alleged graduate research seminar in Washington D.C., and the first Gulf War. I was hooked.

According to this story, a graduate class at a school somewhere in D.C. had set out to collect as much architectural information as it could about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. This meant, at one point, even flying to Europe on a group field trip to visit engineering firms that had done work for Saddam Hussein.

Given the atmosphere at the time, the students most likely thought that their class was an act of protest, a kind of anti-war gesture, meant to help record, document, and even preserve Iraqi architecture before it was destroyed by the U.S. invasion.

Ironically, though, unbeknownst to those students—possibly even to their professor—the seminar’s research was being used to help target U.S. smart bombs. Or, as I phrase this in a new article for The Daily Beast, “there was a reason U.S. forces could put a missile through a window in Baghdad: they knew exactly where the window was. Architecture students in Washington D.C. had unwittingly helped them target it.”

[Image: YouTube].

But then things got complicated.

When I called my source back a few weeks later to follow up, it felt like a scene from a spy film: he said he didn’t remember telling me this (!) before joking that he was getting old and maybe saying things he shouldn’t have. This obviously only made me more determined to find out more.

I called every major school in Washington D.C. I FOIA’d the CIA. I started down a series of rabbit holes that led me from true stories of Gulf War espionage, involving U.S. attempts to collect blueprints for Saddam’s bunkers from engineering firms all over Europe, to a conversation with the head of targeting for the entire U.S. Air Force during Operation Desert Storm.

Along the way, I also kept finding more and more examples of architects and espionage, from Baron Robert Baden-Powell’s incredible use of butterfly sketches to hide floor plans of enemy forts to a 16th-century Italian garden designer who was, most likely, a spy.

[Image: Robert Baden-Powell’s clever use of entomological sketches to hide enemy floorplans, from his essay “My Adventures as a Spy.” See also Mark David Kaufman’s interesting essay about Baden-Powell for the Public Domain Review].

Even Michelangelo gets involved, as his designs for urban fortifications outside Florence, Italy, were secretly modeled in cork and snuck out of the city by an architect named Niccolò di Raffaello dei Pericoli—or Tribolo—in order to help plan a more effective siege (an anecdote I have written about here before).

In any case, I was sitting on this story for the past two years, waiting for my FOIA request to come back from the CIA and trying to set up interviews with people who might have known, first-hand, what I was asking about. The resulting article, my attempt to track down whether such a class took place, is finally up over at The Daily Beast. If any of the above sounds interesting, please click through to check it out.

Finally, of course, if this rings any bells with you—if you took a class like this and, in retrospect, now have doubts about its real purpose—please be in touch.