What If the Allies Had Won At Gallipoli?

A century ago this month, the Gallipoli Campaign ended as the Allied army quietly evacuated the small peninsula on which they had landed the previous April. The evacuation was well-planned and went off without a hitch. It was the only successful aspect of a campaign that had begun with high hopes but had turned into one of the worst Allied disasters of the First World War.

The campaign had been the brainchild of Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty. The Ottoman Empire had entered the war on the side of the Germans in October of 1914 and launched an offensive against the Russians in Caucasus Mountains. As Russia was already hard-pressed fighting on the Eastern Front against the Germans and Austro-Hungarians, they appealed to the British and French for a diversionary operation against the Turks. Churchill proposed a naval attack through the Dardanelles to capture the Turkish capital at Constantinople (today called Istanbul) and force the Ottoman government to surrender.

Success in such an endeavor would have had a number of positive results for the Allies. Pressure on the Russians on the Caucasus Front would have been relieved and a reliable line of supply through the Black Sea would have been established between the Russians in the East and the British and French in the West. This would not only have allowed war material from the Western Allies to flow to the Russians, but would have also allowed Russian wheat to flow to the outside world. The Balkan nations of Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece were uncertain as to whom they should support; the capture of Constantinople would surely swing them towards the Allied side, opening up another front against Germany and Austria-Hungary.

In February and March of 1915, a large naval force of British and French battleships attempted to force the straits. Although many Turkish forts were blasted to pieces, the Allies were frustrated by mobile Turkish artillery and naval mines. Several obsolete Allied ships were sunk by the mines, though with surprisingly little loss of life. The Allied commander, Admiral John de Robeck, felt he could not use his minesweepers to clear the minefields until the mobile Turkish artillery had been dealt with and this could only be done by ground troops. The attempt to force the straits by naval action alone was therefore abandoned.

Churchill was outraged and felt that de Robeck could have succeeded had he pressed his attack. Some historians have since suggested that the Turkish artillery was running low on ammunition when the decision was made to halt the attack and that a renewed naval attack might have broken through, though the evidence for this is somewhat doubtful. No one seems to have considered the difficulty of occupying an enormous city with warships that carried no soldiers.

This fiasco turned out to be only the beginning of a story filled with mishaps, mistakes, and misguided decisions. Allied troops landed on six different beaches on the Gallipoli peninsula on April 25. Fierce fighting erupted on some of the beaches, with bridgeheads only being secured after heavy casualties. On other beaches, however, there was no Turkish resistance and bridgeheads were established quite easily and with no losses. Yet the Allied commanders at those places made little effort to advance inland. This strange and inexplicable lassitude allowed Turkish reinforcements to arrive, some under the command of General Mustafa Kemal, later the founder of the Republic of Turkey. These troops were able to seal off the Allied bridgeheads after further heavy fighting and prevent any movement inland.

Then followed endless months of brutal trench warfare, equal to if not worse than the nightmare already unfolding on the Western Front in France and Flanders. Both sides suffered heavy casualties in an endless cycle of attack and counterattack, with the front scarcely moving more than a few yards in either direction. Some of Britain's finest regiments, including the Lancashire Fusiliers, the South Wales Borderers, and the Royal Scots, left their blood on the beaches and hills of Gallipoli. The Australian and New Zealand troops of the ANZAC Corps fought magnificently, earning a legendary place in military history at an enormous cost in casualties. Tens of thousands of French troops, whose involvement has been strangely overlooked by historians, also struggled and died in the Gallipoli trenches. Sikhs and Gurkhas from the Indian Raj played their part in the campaign. But nothing could break the solid Turkish lines.

A massive offensive in August, however, caught the Ottomans off guard. While the troops at the tip of the peninsula hurled themselves against the Turkish lines, a landing was made in Suvla Bay, north of the bridgehead, which came ashore against virtually no Turkish resistance. The troops at Suvla Bay were in a perfect position to outflank the Turkish defenders and collapse their entire position. For a brief moment, the prospect of an Allied victory in Gallipoli that would open the way to Constantinople suddenly seemed possible again. But the British commander at Suvla Bay, General Frederick Stopford, proved to be the very model of an absolutely inept and incompetent general. After landing, he made virtually no effort to advance inland. Turkish troops under General Kemal soon arrived and sealed off the bridgehead, just as had happened on the original landing sites in April.

The following months followed the same routine of trench warfare, boredom mixed with terror on an hourly basis. In the fall, the decision was made to evacuate the Allied forces from the peninsula. As already mentioned, the evacuation was well-planned and well-executed, the only operation of the entire campaign that was not an utter fiasco. The Allied forces left behind nearly 45,000 dead comrades, while nearly 100,000 Allied soldiers were wounded. As for the Ottomans, 250,000 of their men fell, dead or wounded, in defense of their capital city.

The Gallipoli Campaign was one of the great Allied disasters of the First World War. Not only had they suffered terrible losses for no gain, but they had been humiliated by the Turks, whom they had previously believed to be an inferior enemy. 1915 had been a year of unremitting disaster for the Allies. On the Western Front, the British and French armies dashed themselves to pieces against the German fortified positions. On the Eastern Front, the Russian armies were shattered in the Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive and driven back hundreds of miles. Serbia, despite a gallant resistance, was crushed in the fall. The Allied defeat at Gallipoli was yet another humiliation piled on all the rest.

Of course, the Allies went on to win the First World War. They eventually crushed the Ottoman Empire and defeated Germany in 1918. But the price was horrific. Literally millions of people died. Russia collapsed into a chaotic revolution that eventually gave birth to the nightmare that was Soviet communism. Germany was put on the path that eventually gave rise to Nazism and set the stage for an even greater conflict twenty years later.

But what if the Allies had won at Gallipoli?

There are any number of ways in which an Allied victory in the campaign might have been achieved. Perhaps if Admiral John de Robeck had had the gumption to press on with his attack, the British battleships would have anchored off Constantinople in late March and dictated terms to a cowed Ottoman government. If the Allied commanders on some of the beaches on April 25 had shown a bit more initiative, or if Mustafa Kemal had not been on the top of his game, the Turkish defense could have fallen apart. If General Stopford had shown the least but of aggressiveness in August, the Allied could have turned the Turkish defensive position and bagged the entire Ottoman army. There are probably many more "point of divergence" that would have given the Allies, rather than the Turks, victory in the Gallipoli Campaign. What then?

There can be no doubt that an Allied success at Gallipoli would have been an enormous victory, perhaps even a war-winning one. By knocking Turkey out of the war, the Allies would have freed up hundreds of thousands of troops for service on the Western Front, who would otherwise have had to be deployed in Palestine or in Mesopotamia, while the Russians would have similarly been able to shift soldiers from the Caucasus Front to fight against the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. Allied control of Constantinople would have allowed munitions and supplies to flow to Russia from the British and French, while allowing Russian wheat to flow in the opposite direction, to the mutual benefit of both. This would have allowed Russia to escape from many of the shortages of military munitions that bedeviled it in actual history, while greatly easing the price of food in the markets of London and Paris (which might not sound important but which was essential for the winning of the war).

When the Gallipoli Campaign was launched, the Balkan nations of Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania were sitting on the sidelines, waiting to see whether the Allied powers or the Central Powers would emerge the victors in the conflict. In 1915, having witnessed the Allied bungling at Gallipoli, Bulgaria would opt to side with the Central Powers. Romania would side with the Allies in 1916, in the wake of the seemingly successful Brusilov Offensive, only to be smashed by the Central Powers later in the year. Greece would eventually wait until 1917 to cast its lot with the Allies.

Needless to say, the situation would have been very different had the Allies won at Gallipoli. With a Turkish surrender, it is entirely possible that Bulgaria, Romania, and Greece would have cast their lot with the Allies before the end of 1915. Serbia, which historically was crushed by a combined German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian invasion in late 1915, might have been kept in the war. Combined with a British and French expeditionary force, this would have constituted a powerful third front in the war against the Central Powers. A fourth, the Italian Front, was also about to open.

Putting all these factors together - more manpower available to the British and French on the Western Front and the Russians on the Eastern Front, the entry of the Balkan powers on the Allied side in 1915, the easy shipment of war material through the Dardanelles to Russia - it is easy to imagine that Germany and Austria-Hungary could have been brought to their knees in the middle of 1916, rather than late 1918.

Think of the momentous consequences of this. If the war ended more than two years before it did historically, many millions of people who died during the conflict would have still been alive in 1918. Into this number we should include the million or so Armenians who were ruthlessly slaughtered by the Ottomans in the wake of the Allied failure at Gallipoli. Saving all these lives would not only have been a miracle from any humanitarian point of view, but consider how many potential scientists, statesmen, engineers, poets, artists, and composers died in the trenches of the war. What might they have contributed to human knowledge and culture had they survived?

If the war had ended in 1916, Russia will quite possibly avoid the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War. This would not only mean that a Romanov Tsar might have still been on the throne of Russia today, but it would mean that Russia would have avoided the nightmare of Soviet Communism. Thanks to the "butterfly effect", which always must be considered when we ask ourselves serious alternate history questions, we can assume that Nazism would never have arisen in Germany, since it would not have had Russian communism to use as a bogeyman, nor would Maoism have arisen in China, since it would have not had the Soviet Union to serve as an inspiration. There would have been no Holocaust and no Cultural Revolution, sparing yet more millions of lives. As with the war itself, this would not only have been good in and of itself, but we have to stop and ask how many geniuses who would have lived to fulfill their potential were lost in those nightmarish massacres.

Gallipoli was the only major opportunity for an Allied victory in the First World War before the actual victory was achieved in late 1918 (and that only with the help of the United States). None of the French offensives on the Western Front in 1914 or 1915 were going to break the German line. Neither was the British offensive on the Somme in 1916. In 1917, both the French (at the Aisne) and the British (at Passchensdaele) launched massive attacks against the German lines and were thrown back yet again, suffering such heavy casualties that the French army mutinied and refused to fight further. Throughout the war, the Russians and the Italians proved so inept that they presented no serious threat to the Germans. If the Allies were going to win the war earlier than they actually did, Gallipoli had been the place to do it.

Speaking for myself, if they had succeeded at Gallipoli, we'd all be a lot better off today.

What If Alexander the Great Had Lived to Old Age?

Alexander the Great died in June of 323 BC in the city of Babylon, which he had decreed would be the capital of his new empire. Having become King of Macedonia upon the assassination of his father, Philip II, in 336 BC, Alexander had secured control of Greece before setting out on a campaign to conquer the Persians. By the time he died, Alexander had built an empire that stretched from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River, spreading Hellenic culture across an unprecedentedly vast territory.

During his campaign of conquest, Alexander fought and won four pitched battles and countless smaller engagements, while successfully besieging innumerable fortresses and cities. He and his army overcame tremendous geographic and logistical difficulties. In addition to the armies of the Persian Empire, he fought against vast hordes of Greek mercenaries in Asia Minor, Bactrian horsemen in the mountains of Afghanistan, and legions of Hindu warriors led by powerful kings in the Indus Valley. Not only did he set himself up as King of Asia, but was proclaimed Pharaoh of Egypt and, for good measure, had the Greek city-states declare that he was the son of Zeus.

Alexander was the greatest conqueror the ancient world had ever known. What makes his achievement all the more astonishing is the fact that, at the time of his death, he was only thirty-two years old.

There are conflicting accounts as to the cause of Alexander's death. Some historians believe he simply succumbed to an ordinary disease that emerged from the swamps around Babylon, such as typhoid fever. Others have linked his death to his habitual overindulgence in alcohol. Still others maintain that Alexander was assassinated by means of poison, his murderer being one of his Macedonian subordinates. Blame has been laid specifically at the feet of Antipater, the general Alexander left in charge of Greece during the campaign against the Persians, who had been accused of malfeasance by Olympia, Alexander's mother. To forestall his own execution, so the thinking goes, Antipater arranged to have Alexander poisoned. It is certainly a possibility.

Whatever the cause of Alexander's death, his empire died with him. As he lay on his deathbed, Alexander was asked by his generals to name his successor. According to the historian Diodorus, his reply was, "To the strongest." His generals took him at his word and spent the next few decades battling one another in a series of brutal conflicts known as the Wars of Diaochi. When the dust settled, what had been Alexander's empire had been divided up into a series of successor states ruled by various Macedonian families. These mini-empires would later prove easy pickings for the Romans.

The fact that Alexander had achieved so much and died at such an early age begs the question: what if Alexander had not died in 323 BC? What if, instead, he had lived to a ripe old age? Might his empire have survived and perhaps event expanded?

According to the ancient historians, Alexander the Great was planning another series of conquests when he died. He had given orders from Phoenician shipwrights to begin construction on a massive armada or warships in the ports of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, clearly intended for service in the Persian Gulf. His initial goal was said to be the conquest of Arabia.

On the face of it, the idea of conquering Arabia seems rather odd. Arabia was sparsely populated and politically disorganized. Aside from being a juncture of the ancient spice trade, it seemingly had little to offer. One can scan through the names of previous conquerors going all the way back to Sargon the Great, two thousand years before Alexander, and not find a single one who paid the least bit of attention to Arabia. Much more likely, Alexander's intention was to secure the various island in the Persian Gulf in order to provide a safe sea route between the Tigris-Euphrates delta in Mesopotamia and the Indus River Valley in what is today Pakistan, thereby created a good communication and transportation link with the eastern portion of his empire. What this says about Alexander's eventual intentions towards India is anyone's guess.

Once the Persian Gulf had been secured, Alexander's intention was apparently to extend his empire farther to the west. The historian Arrian tells us that, in the year before his death, Alexander received numerous embassies from Mediterranean countries, including Carthage and several in Italy, Sicily, and even as far as Spain. All brought gifts and some asked Alexander to adjudicate various disputes. One gets the impressions that these diplomatic missions were as much intelligence-gathering operations as anything else, sizing Alexander up to determine what sort of threat he posed.

It was a big threat, indeed. In addition to the fleet being fitted out for the conquest of Arabia, Alexander had given orders for a massive shipbuilding program throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The shipyards of Egypt and Phoenicia hummed with the steady labor of uncountable numbers of workers, who were charged with turning out no less than a thousand warships. Such an armada would have dwarfed even the vaunted navy of Carthage. Combined with the armies of Greek, Macedonian, and Persian soldiers at Alexander's command, it would have been by far the most formidable military force ever assembled up to that point.

If Alexander had lived long enough to set out on a new campaign of conquest, this time to the west, what route might he have taken? Might he have marched straight overland across North Africa from Egypt to Carthage, supplying his vast army by ship? If so, Carthage might have been captured in an epic siege after a brave but hopeless resistance more than a hundred and fifty years before it happened historically. In this case, the men storming over the Carthaginian walls would not have been Romans, but a conglomerate army of Greeks, Macedonians, and Persians.

Alternatively, Alexander might have crossed into southern Italy from Greece, as Pyrrhus of Epirus did in 280 BC, just over forty years after Alexander's death. Might Alexander have conquered the Greek city-states of southern Italy? Could this have brought him into conflict with the emerging power of the Roman Republic? Considering the vast forces at his command, it seems likely that Alexander could have made himself master of Italy. On the other hand, many people in the ancient world underestimated the Romans and later learned to regret it.

Assuming Alexander had lived long enough to campaign in North Africa, Sicily, and/or Italy, the eastern portions of his realm would have faced a terrible threat in the subsequent years. Around 320 BC, the great King Chandragupta came to power in India, establishing the Maurya Empire. Under his rule and that of his successors, the Maurya Empire would bring almost the entire Indian subcontinent under its control and continue to rule for over a century. Although not well known in the West, Chandragupta's achievements were no less impressive than those of Alexander himself.

Historically, Chandragupta conquered the Macedonian mini-empires that remained in the Indus Valley after Alexander's death. Conceivably, his efforts to consolidate control of India might have brought Chandragupta into conflict with Alexander himself if the latter had remained alive. We can only imagine what might have happened had these two men, both of whom rank among the world's greatest conquerors, met in battle at the command of two enormous armies. It surely would have gone down in history as one of the greatest battles in history.

Most speculation about what might have happened had Alexander lived a longer life focuses on what other lands he might have brought under his control. However, we should consider the possibility that his empire might have fallen apart anyway even if he had not died in 323 BC.

Although Alexander had brought Macedonia to unprecedented, indeed unimaginable, heights of power, it is clear that both his Macedonia generals and the Macedonian rank-and-file were largely disillusioned with Alexander by the time they returned to Babylon from their years of conquest. The great king's efforts to integrate Macedonian and Persian society by giving important positions to Persians and by encouraging Macedonian officers to take Persian wives was deeply resented by his longtime comrades-in-arms. All they wanted to do was return home and enjoy the fruits of their victories. Had Alexander called on them to embark upon another series of wars, would the have followed him?

Had he lived a longer life, Alexander might have led forth new armies and navies on another round of conquest, this time to the west rather than the east. Carthage, Sicily, and perhaps Italy could have fallen under his sway. But it's equally likely, if not more so, that Alexander would have died in the course of these campaigns or been done in by some Macedonian noble whom he had offended or who simply wanted to go home. Throughout his life, Alexander was severely wounded on a number of occasions and also seems to have been targeted by more than a few assassination plots. If he escaped death in 323 BC, he might still have died shortly afterwards.

In the end, the hopes for a long-lasting Alexandrian Empire would rest on whether Alexander the Great could create a stable dynasty. When Alexander died, his wife Roxana was pregnant with a child that proved to be a boy. He became a pawn of the Macedonian generals in the Wars of the Diadochi and was assassinated when he was thirteen-years-old. But if Alexander had lived, his son would have been raised with all the protection, education, and regal attention a prospective imperial successor could expect.

If Alexander the Great had not died in Babylon in 323 BC and had lived long enough to ensure a stable transition of power to his son, there is at least a chance that a long-lasting Alexandrian Empire could have been established. Perhaps the Mediterranean and the Middle East would have been fused together into a single cultural entity, rather in the same manner that Qin Shi Huang unified China in the 3rd Century BC. Needless to say, the subsequent history of the world would have been radically different than it turned out to be.

The South Could Have Won the Civil War

It is an article of faith among a great many historians, both popular and academic, that the South never had a chance to win the American Civil War and was doomed to defeat from the moment Fort Sumter was fired upon. This was central tenant of the "Lost Cause" school of history for nearly a century after the war; it was easier for people in the South to accept that they had lost if they could tell themselves that they had never had a chance to win. If victory had been possible, the white South would have had to explain to itself why it had failed. Modern historians, for their part, seem reluctant to acknowledge that a Southern victory was possible because, in the politically correct world in which we live, this might be somehow misinterpreted as a defense of slavery.

In the magisterial documentary series The Civil War, by Ken Burns, Shelby Foote sums up the idea with his typically wry and profound way.

I think that the North fought that war with one hand behind its back. At the same time the war was going on, the Homestead Act was being passed, all these marvelous inventions were going on. In the spring of '64, the Harvard-Yale boat races were going on and not a man in either crew ever volunteered for the army or the navy. They didn't need them. I think that if it had been more Southern successes, and a lot more, the North simply would have brought that other hand out from behind its back. I don't think the South ever had a chance to win that war.

It is quite true that the Union had enormous advantages over the Confederacy. There were twenty-two million people in the North and only nine million in the South. Moreover, a third of the South's population were black slaves, which might be used for manual labor but which could not be used as soldiers. After all, if the Confederates were to give their slaves weapons, how could they be sure the slaves wouldn't immediately turn them against those who enslaved them? Even worse, many of these blacks would join the Union army if they took control of the territory in which they lived.

Bottom line: the pool of military manpower was much larger for the Union than it was for the Confederacy. It's no surprise, therefore, that the Northern armies were larger in almost every major battle than were the Southern armies. Only at Chickamauga in September of 1863 was a major battle fought in which the Confederates outnumbered their opponents, and then not by very much. More typical were battles like Chancellorsville, in which the South was outnumbered by roughly two-to-one. As Voltaire said, "Dieu est toujours les gros bataillions."

Perhaps even more important than the North's numerical superiority was its vast advantage in terms of industrial power. Throughout the Northern states, pillars of smoke rose from countless factories producing every conceivable kind of war material. Rifles and cannon, of course, but also uniforms, saddles, boots, haversacks, camp equipment, and all other sorts of things. Wars are fought with more than weapons; if your men don't have boots or the means to cook their food, the armies will dissolve. It was very easy for the Union to produce massive amounts of war material, but extremely difficult for the Confederacy to do so.

Another crucial advantage, strangely overlooked by historians, is the North's financial superiority. Then as now, New York City was the financial center of the country. Abraham Lincoln's government would have an existing fiscal infrastructure and easy access to credit, while Jefferson Davis had to start the war by begging pitiful amounts of money from state governments or tiny banks scattered around the South. Wars are won and lost on the floors of the bond market no less than the battlefield and in this regard the North had an even greater advantage than in manpower or industrial power.

Finally, the United States Navy remained entirely under the control of the government in Washington. Though not nearly strong enough to effectively blockade the Confederacy at the outset of hostilities, it served as the foundation for the development of what would eventually become a powerful naval force that would play a crucial role in the conflict.

To summarize, the Confederacy started its struggle for independence vastly outnumbered in terms of the number of soldiers, vastly inferior to the Union in terms of the industrial and financial power necessary to wage war, and lacking any fleet with which to combat the naval strength of the North. Given these facts, combined with the fact that the South did, indeed, lose the war in the end, I don't blame those who claim that the South never had a chance of winning.

I do believe, though, that these people are wrong. The South could have won the war. Allow me to set out a few facts so as to convince you that I am correct.

While conceding the enormous advantages the Union enjoyed, we have to acknowledge that the Confederacy had certain advantages of its own. The most important was the simple fact that they were fighting on the strategic defensive. The Union had no choice but to invade the Confederacy and conquer its territory, but the South did not need to do the same to the North. It merely needed to defend its own territory. Put simply, the South did not need to really win the war; it simply needed to avoid losing it.

Fighting on the strategic defensive, the Southern commanders were much more likely to be familiar with the ground on which the campaigning would take place than their Northern opponents. This advantage should not be underrated. Such seemingly mundane things as knowing where a river can be crossed, where a ravine is in which a regiment of troops might be concealed, or whether a road on a map is a real road or just a muddy trail can sometimes make the difference between victory and defeat. Throughout the war, the South's knowledge of the terrain gave it a decided advantage.

Much is often made about the idea that the Confederate generals were better than the Union generals. On the level of army and corps command, I do not really agree. It is true that Union commanders like Ambrose Burnside, Nathaniel Banks, and George McClellan left a great deal to be desired. But the South had plenty of terrible generals, too: Leonidas Polk, Braxton Bragg, John Bell Hood (at least as an army commander), and John Pemberton come immediately to mind. The South had men like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, but then the North had men like Ulysses S. Grant and George Thomas. Both sides had a few outstanding army and corps commanders and a large number of mediocre or poor ones. I don't think either side can claim a significant advantage over the other in this area.

On a lower level, however, I don't think there's any question that Confederate officers were made of a higher caliber than their Yankee counterparts. The South excelled at bringing forth brilliant leaders on the regimental, brigade, and division level. Southern society before the war was militaristic to a degree unknown in the North. A much larger proportion of Southern families sent their young men into the military than was the case in the North. There were many more private military academies, such as the Virginia Military Institute and the Citadel, in the South than there were in the North. The militia system, largely in place due to fear of slave uprisings, was much more developed in the South than in the North. It should not come as any surprise to us that Southern society was able to bring forth outstanding military officers in a way that the North could only dream of.

As a representative example, consider General Robert Rodes. He was not a graduate of West Point nor had he been a career soldier before the war. He had graduated from Virginia Military Institute in 1848 and worked as a teacher and engineer. When the work broke out in 1861, he became a colonel and put his military education to outstanding use, rising first to brigade and then division command in Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. He fought gallantly through the war until being killed at the Third Battle of Winchester in 1864. The South was full of men like Robert Rodes, while the North had a great deal more trouble finding them.

The South was largely able to negate the Union's industrial advantage through an amazing, and underappreciated, effort to create a war effort almost from scratch. During the first year of the war, the Confederacy relied on weapons taken from federal arsenals at the time of secession, weapons run through the blockade from Europe, and weapons captured from the Union on the battlefield. Later on, however, a fair chunk of the South's war material was being produced domestically. Factories in Richmond, Atlanta, Selma, and other cities were turning out large numbers of rifles, cannon and other war material. An enormous facility at Augusta, Georgia, was built to produce huge amounts of gunpowder. This was largely due to the hard work and brilliance of a single individual: Colonel Josiah Gorgas, the Confederate Chief of Ordnance, who oversaw the creation of this sprawling manufacturing empire. Because of this, the South never lost a battle because it lacked sufficient weapons and ammunition.

The situation was very different when it came to the Commissary-General, Colonel Lucius Northrop, whose job it was to produce and transport food, fodder, and clothing to the Confederate armies. Northrop quite simply had no idea how to do his job; the dictionary entry for "incompetent" should have Northrop's picture next to it. He probably did more to deprive Confederate armies of food and clothing than every Yankee cavalry raid put together. When asked to take the helm of the War Department late in the war, John C. Breckinridge told Jefferson Davis that he would only do so if Northrop, an old friend of Davis's, was fired (Davis reluctantly got rid of him). The lack of food and clothing that bedeviled Confederate armies throughout the war, quite in contrast to the situation regarding weapons and ammunition, was not due to any inherent lack of resources so much as one man's incompetence. One can only wonder how much more effective Confederate armies would have been had a man of Gorgas's caliber been Commissary-General. It is clear, however, that the South's difficulty in getting food to its armies was due at least as much to its own failings as to the efforts of the enemy.

Then there was the morale factor. At the outset of the war, white Southerners of all classes came together to defend their homes and their way of life. Their attitude towards African slavery revolts modern sensibilities, of course, but there is no denying the fervency of their devotion to the cause when the war began. Sacrifices were willingly made and a huge proportion of the white Southern population eventually found its way into uniform. Though Southern leaders disagreed bitterly about strategy and the suitability of Jefferson Davis to be President, there was no difficulty in persuading their people of the need to fight. Outside of East Tennessee and a few other pockets, there was effectively no genuine opposition to the war itself. Abraham Lincoln faced a much greater task in the Union, where there was a large and active anti-war movement from the commencement of the war. In 1864, anti-war Democrats almost succeeded in bringing about the defeat of Lincoln in that year's presidential election, which might have meant the end of the war.

This, then, was the Confederacy: a largely united people fighting on their own ground under competent and often brilliant officers, eventually armed with weapons produced mostly in their own factories, knowing that they only had to avoid losing in order to win. The North might have superior manpower and material, might subject them to naval blockade, and might have access to vastly more money, but to consider the Confederates as hopelessly outmatched is simply incorrect. They were able to make themselves into a truly formidable enemy to the Union.

There were two genuine paths to victory for the Confederacy, either one of which might have come to pass had the course of history been a bit different. The first was the possibility of foreign recognition of the Confederacy by one of the great European powers. The second was the possibility that Northern political will to go on with the fight might collapse, leading to the defeat of the Lincoln administration and the arrival of an administration willing to make peace.

Foreign recognition was a distinct possibility, especially early in the war. The Trent Affair in the fall of 1861 very nearly caused a war between the United States and the British Empire. Britain and France flirted with recognition of the Confederacy in the fall of 1862 until the failure of the Maryland Campaign caused them to reconsider. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation made foreign recognition much less likely, there was an effort by some members of Parliament to push British recognition of the South in the summer of 1863 and there remained substantial support for the South in London and Paris even towards the end of the war.

Lincoln had made it clear that recognition of the Confederacy by Britain or France would be a cause for war. As strong as was the Union, it paled when set against the British Empire. The Royal Navy would have gobbled up the Northern merchant marine and simply blockaded the ports of the Union until it agreed to peace. Fighting would surely have erupted along the Canadian border and the United States would have had an obvious advantage, but every brigade the Union sent there would be one less brigade the Confederacy would have had to deal with. It also would have opened up European financial markets to the South, making inflation a much less serious problem than was the case historically. Putting all these factors together, it's quite obvious that a conflict between the United States and the British Empire (and probably France) would almost certainly have led to Confederate independence.

The other path to Confederate independence, that of a collapse in Union political will, was probably more likely. In fact, it very nearly happened in the summer of 1864. Contrary to popular belief, Gettysburg and Vicksburg did not mark the great turning point of the war, after which the Confederacy steadily collapsed. The great turning point was the summer and early fall of 1864. The 1864 campaign had begun as little short of a disaster for the Union. In the East, Grant suffered unspeakably heavy casualties in a series of terrible battles against Lee, which ended with the Confederates still solidly in control of Richmond. Meanwhile, Jubal Early raided Maryland, came within a hairsbreadth of capturing Washington itself, and burned the town of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. In the Western Theater, Sherman seemed unable to either defeat Joseph Johnston's army or capture Atlanta, while Nathan Bedford Forrest was smashing one Union force after another in northern Mississippi.

All these defeats brought morale on the Northern home front to a low point and brought forth increasing demands for a negotiated end of the war. The price the Union was paying in blood and treasure, it was clearly felt, was not worth paying any longer, as the Confederacy appeared to be as strong as ever. The Democrats set forth a platform at their national convention that year calling for a ceasefire. Even Henry Raymond, chairman of the Republican National Committee, quietly suggested seeking peace talks. Abraham Lincoln was keenly aware that a ceasefire would be tantamount to Confederate independence, for if the fighting ended there would be no political will in the North for it to resume later on.

It wasn't until the summer and early fall of 1864, just before the presidential election, that the picture changed. Three great Union victories - Farragut in Mobile Bay, Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, and above all Sherman at Atlanta - restored faith among the Northern public that they were going to win the war and that the terrible cost would eventually be marked by victory. Lincoln as reelected and, as we know, the Union went on to win the war within the next six months. But the situation had been balanced on a razor's edge and could easily have gone the other way. Had it, the Confederacy could have won the war.

(Many readers will recognize the above scenario, as it forms the basis of the plot for my novel Shattered Nation.)

To conclude, it is wrong to believe that the South could never have won the Civil War. Yes, the North had clear advantages, but the South had advantages, too. Whether by the path of foreign recognition or political changes in the North, there was every possibility that the Confederacy might have emerged triumphant. Indeed, had I been an observer in 1861, I might have placed my money on the South.

Had the Confederacy won, needless to say, historians today would be arguing that the North never had a chance of winning and the victory of the South was certain from the moment the war began.

Five Historical Events That Should Be Made Into Cable Miniseries

By and large, television has confirmed the famous 1961 prediction of then-FEC Chairman Newton Minnow, in that is has become a "vast wasteland". A quick glance at the what is being shown on the various cable stations on any given night easily confirms this. We are awash in reality television about disagreeable people doing disagreeable things, sitcoms that are not funny, pseudo-documentaries about made-up things, and other unpleasant programs. Whenever I scroll through the cable stations to see what's on, I feel a sudden need to wash my hands.

Amid the trash, though, there are a few gems. In particular, HBO has produced some outstanding history-based mini-series over the last twenty years or so. It started with From the Earth to the Moon in the late 1990s; I remember watching it in rapt fascination. The two wonderful programs about men in the Second World War, Band of Brothers and The Pacific, are both of top-notch quality. While the sex could have been toned down a bit and the incest done away with entirely (especially as it didn't advance the plot) I absolutely loved Rome, especially the first season. I wish it could have been spread out to four or five seasons instead of just two. Finally, John Adams was the best thing that has ever been on television, as far as I'm concerned.

HBO has done a great job and some other networks picked up on the trend. Showtime produced The Tudors, which I liked very much. I admit that I have not yet seen The Borgias, but have heard it was good. Netflix has also jumped on the history mini-series bandwagon with a show about Marco Polo. AMC has produced a wonderful show about the Culper spy ring called Turn, which highlights one of the lesser-known aspects of the American Revolution. A&E, back when it was making quality television, produced Longitude, a lovely two-part series on John Harrison's invention of the chronometer, based on the Dava Sobel book of the same name.

I often ask myself what historical event or period I would want to see made into a television mini-series. Assuming it would have a decent budget, good actors, and good writers, I eventually settled on the following five choices. Each has the amazing drama and astonishing characters to make for an outstanding show.

1. The Conquest of the Aztecs by Hernan Cortes
Could you ask for a more dramatic story? It's the tale of a small band of Spanish soldier-explorers journeying to an unknown land and discovering an empire vaster, more powerful, and more mysterious than they could have imagined in their widest dreams. They then embark on the seemingly mad quest to take control of this empire and loot it of its riches. The Aztecs, not understanding anything about the strangers, do not know how to respond to their intrusion until it is too late. The meeting of Cortes and Moctezuma on the causeway leading into Tenochtitlan is as dramatic as history gets. The events of La Noche Triste, the desperate and terrifying escape of the Spanish across the divided causeway out of the city, are seemingly tailor-made for a talented director to transpose onto the screen. The intrigue between and among the Spanish, the Aztecs, and the various native states (especially the Tlaxcallans, who became allies of the Spanish) rivals the plots and machinations one would find in the court of a Renaissance city-state.

It is a story of terrible battles, dramatic escapes, dark betrayals, grand settings, and forceful personalities. You cannot find a more astonishing character than Hernan Cortes in the pages of any novel ever written. The Aztec Emperor Moctezuma II could have served as a Shakespearean character who manifests indecisiveness as his chief character flaw. The Aztec leaders Cuitlahuac and Cuauhtémoc played the role of noble warriors determined to defend their people against the alien invaders. You even have a femme fatale in the form of La Malinche, the native woman who became the translator and lover of Cortes.

I'm amazed that this hasn't been made into a mini-series already.

2. The Fall of Constantinople
To describe this story of history as "epic" is to understate the case. Constantinople had stood as the capital of the Byzantine Empire for more than a thousand years. It was the magnificent citadel of Eastern Christianity, keeping alive the classical learning of ancient Greece and guarding Europe against the Islamic forces of the Arabs and the Turks. At its height, Constantinople was unquestionably the most impressive and splendid city in the world. However, wrecked by the Crusaders in 1204, it was a shadow of its former self by 1453, when the Ottoman Turks arrived outside its walls.

The Ottomans had risen quickly from nomads to empire-builders and they were determined to wrest Constantinople from the Christians and make it their own capital. But the walls protecting Constantinople were legendary for their strength. Week after week, the Turks attacked repeatedly only to be thrown back. Dramatic naval battles raged on the waters around the city. In nightmarish underground combat, Turks sought to tunnel underneath the great walls while Byzantine troops in turn sought to dig countermines to stop them. And then there was the final, terrible, irresistible assault of May 29, which finally overwhelmed the Christian defenders and allowed the Turks to force their way past the walls through sheer force of numbers.

Want interesting characters? You can't ask for better than you'd get from the story of the Fall of Constantinople. You have Emperor Constantine XI, heir of a line that goes all the way back to Augustus, determined to defend what remains of the once great empire no matter what the cost. You have Sultan Mehmed II, young, ambitious, brilliant, and determined to make his name in history by capturing the fabled city. You have the legendary Genoese soldier Giovanni Giustiniani, commander of the land wall, fighting gallantly in defense of Constantinople. You have the enigmatic Scotsman John Grant, military engineer extraordinaire, who could have only arrived in Constantinople after countless adventures the nature of which we can only guess at. You have the ruthless Ottoman commander Zagan Pasha, who showed no mercy to the Christians. You have the Ottoman Grand Vizier Halil Pasha, who constantly counseled caution to Mehmed and may have been playing both sides.

This is a story crying out to be made into a dramatic mini-series.

3. The Indian Mutiny of 1857
This story is utterly fascinating and enthralling and involves so many issues with which we are still dealing in the early 21st Century. Not even a decade after the end of the Sikh Wars solidified British control over the Indian Subcontinent, a significant portion of the British Indian Army revolted against its colonial masters. Because the soldiers were known as "sepoys" the conflict became known as the Sepoy Mutiny.

The setting could scarcely be more exotic or fascinating. India is perhaps the most ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse country in the world, with Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, and others  not very harmoniously living together. Into this cultural mix, the British had come crashing a hundred years before. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 represented the greatest threat to the British Empire in India before its actual independence was achieved in 1947.

It's a story of terror and massacre, as both sides inflicted horrific atrocities upon the other. It's also a story filled with dramatic battles and sieges, narrow escapes, and astounding characters. You have the desperate British assault on the walls of Delhi in September, the men knowing full well that the British Empire in India would collapse if they failed and that their own deaths were also virtually certain. You have the Relief of Lucknow, a story so astonishing that one can scarcely believe it really happened.

For characters, you have Bahadur Shah II, dignified yet aging and uncertain, the last of the line of great Mughal Emperors stretching back to Babur in the early 16th Century. You have the brutal yet courageous British soldier and spymaster William Hodson, hero or villain depending on how one chooses to look at him. You have John Nicholson, British political agent and soldier without fear, whose forceful personality was such that a religious cult built around his memory persisted along the Afghan-Pakistani border into the 1980s. You have Rani of Jhansi, the warrior queen who courageously defied the British until the end. As with the other historical episodes we've discussed, the cast of characters in this drama is more extraordinary than the most imaginative creations of any novelist or screenwriter.

4. The Second Punic War
This conflict was the national epic of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. It you took the American Revolution, the Civil War, and America's involvement with the Second World War and wrapped them all together, it would mean to America what the Second Punic War meant to the ancient Romans. And for good reason. It was a conflict of epic proportions.

There is drama aplenty here. The famous crossing of the Alps by Hannibal's army. The Battle of Lake Trasimene, the most successful ambush in military history. The Battle of Cannae, still regarding as the classic example of a double envelopment and battle of annihilation, bar none. The defeat and death of Hannibal's brother Hasdrubal at the Battle of the Metaurus, and the hurling of his head into Hannibal's camp by the Roman cavalry. The epic achievements of Scipio Africanus in Spain and his final defeat of Hannibal at the Battle of Zama.

Hannibal himself is a character screaming out to be put onto the big screen in a major way. He was one of history's great captains and most fascinating personalities, sworn by his father to destroy Rome in a terrifying religious ceremony when he was a little boy. Scipio Africanus was no less of a genius and their meeting at Zama was one of the few times in military history that two genuine military geniuses confronted one another on the same battlefield. You also have the careful, cautious and unperturable Roman leader Fabius Maximus, known as the "Delayer", who gave his name to the military strategy of avoiding battle and seeking to wear your enemy down through attrition and the denial of supplies.

HBO already took the story of the collapse of the Roman Republic in the late 1st Century BC and turned it into a magnificent mini-series. The Second Punic War is rich with potential for a similar epic.

5. Isaac Newton vs. Robert Hooke
This story would not feature epic military engagements, yet it would be no less dramatic if done correctly. Isaac Newton was the greatest scientist who ever lived and, aside from Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammed, the most influential human being of all time. All educated people have heard the story of the falling apple and how it inspired the thinking in his ferociously brilliant mind that eventually led to be development of the universal laws of gravitation. He also is formulated calculus, invented the reflecting telescope, and discovered the underlying laws of optics. Despite his undoubted genius, Newton was not an attractive personality. He was vengeful and vindictive, obsessively secretive, seemingly driven by forces and governed by concerns unknown to ordinary mortals.

Newton's great adversary was a man named Robert Hooke. Today, he is largely unknown, yet he was a giant in his time. A Renaissance Man in the truest sense, he comes across to us as England's answer to Leonardo da Vinci. He was an architect, surveyor, inventor, pioneering paleontologist, and scientist of great renown in his age. Hooke should be known as one of the great figures of the Scientific Revolution. Instead, he wallows in historical oblivion.

Perhaps the primary reason for his obscurity is Isaac Newton. The hatred between Newton and Hooke was ferocious and fiery. Newton accused Hooke of falsely claiming credit for his discoveries; Hooke accused Newton of doing the same thing. Each tried to turn the members of the Royal Society against the other. Their rivalry hovered above the English scientific community of the late 17th Century like threatening storm, which erupted into ferocious storms on more than one occasion. In the end, Newton won their personal war and tried to systematically excise Hooke from the Royal Society. To date, no portrait of Hooke has ever been found and rumors have persisted over the centuries that Newton had them destroyed.

In addition to Newton and Hooke themselves, either of whom is a more interesting character than ever graced the pages of a work of fiction, such a mini-series as this would feature other great men of the Scientific Revolution. Men like Edmund Halley, the astronomer whose name now graces the most famous comet in the Solar System. Or Christopher Wren, the greatest architect of the day and builder of St. Paul's Cathedral. Or Christiaan Huygens, the brilliant Dutch astronomer and inventor who influenced and was influenced by both Newton and Hooke. The great political philosopher John Locke, one of Newton's few genuine friends, might walk on for a cameo. Giants walked the Earth in those days.

A story of scientific discovery, flawed human beings, and fervent hatred, the rivalry between Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke would make for an outstanding television drama.

Any of these five historical episodes would make an outstanding cable mini-series and they're only the first five that popped into my head as I sat down at my desk to write this blog entry. If I really put my mind to it, I'm sure I could come up with dozens more. I'm even more sure that there are countless other historical episodes which would make great televisions dramas of which I am totally unaware.

Get to work, cable networks.

Thomas Jefferson's Big Wine Adventure

Thomas Jefferson was the ideal of a Renaissance Man. He was a statesman, political philosopher, architect, horticulturist, writer, musician, and pioneer of archeology, geology, and paleontology. He spoke seven different languages. On top of all of this, Jefferson was perhaps the greatest wine connoisseur of the 18th Century. Throughout his eventful life, he was always happiest enjoying a glass of fine wine over a lovely dinner in his beloved home of Monticello. In an age when most Americans drank nothing but beer or gin, Jefferson believed that promoting a love of wine among the people would help cultivate a more refined and elegant society in America.

Fittingly, in 1784 the Continental Congress sent Jefferson to Paris, where he succeeded Benjamin Franklin as the American Minister to France. During his years in Paris, he drank in the intoxicating atmosphere of pre-Revolutionary France, relishing its music, art, literature, architecture, and the polite and sophisticated conversation of the Parisian salons. He also delved deeply into the culinary arts of the French table and, of course, its wine.

In 1787, taking a much-needed break from his diplomatic duties, Jefferson set out on a three-month tour of France and northern Italy that would take him through the most famous wine regions of Europe. Being Jefferson, he travelled incognito and took detailed and extensive notes on everything he observed, from the salaries being earned by the winemakers to the type of bread being eaten by the peasants who worked in the vineyards. Because of Jefferson's meticulous documentation, historians have a nearly perfect picture of what is arguably the most famous wine tour in history.

Jefferson set out in late February, heading southeast from Paris in his own private coach. He passed through Chablis without stopping, for its wines were not as well known in his time as they are in ours. He soon arrived in the city of Dijon, the main city of the Burgundy wine region and even then famous for its mustard. For several days in early March, Jefferson moved south from Dijon to the city of Beanue, passing through the whole of the Burgundy region and exploring some of the greatest vineyards in the world.

In his short time in Burgundy, Jefferson developed a love for its wines that would last until his death. In particular, he prized the white wines produced at Montrachet and Meursault, which, like virtually all Burgundy whites, were made from Chardonnay grapes. Both of these are still available and highly prized today. Montrachet is designated a Grand Cru vineyard and its white wines are among the most expensive in the world. Among the Burgundy reds, Jefferson greatly enjoyed Chambertin, still among the most prized red wines in the world. He also delighted in the red wines of Vougeot and Volnay. Because of its affordability, Volnay became one of Jefferson's favorite red table wines, which he often served in later years both at Monticello and the White House.

In mid-March, Jefferson left Burgundy and proceeded south to the Rhone Valley, which he considered exquisitely beautiful. During his time in this part of France, ever the Renaissance Man, Jefferson seemed more interested in Roman archeology than he was in wine, but he still visited many vineyards and sampled several wines. Curiously, he did not think highly of red Rhone wines, although they are justly prized today (by none so much as the author of this blog post!). Jefferson reserved in praise of Rhone wines for their whites, which delighted him. In fact, he considered the dry white wine produced by the celebrated Hermitage vineyard to be "the first wine in the world without exception".

Jefferson arrived in Marsailles at the end of March, where he remained for a week as he explored the possibilities for American commerce in the great Mediterranean port. He then journeyed over the Alps into northern Italy. His primary goal was to investigate methods of rice production which might he useful to American farmers; he even illegally smuggled samples of rice seed out of the region and sent them to friends in South Carolina. Still, he took the time to sample some of the great wines of northern Italy. He described wine made from Nebbiolo grapes as "sweet", "astringent", and "brisk". These are traits that few wine wasters associated with Nebbiolo wines today, because the methods of making the wine have changed considerably. Still, Jefferson greatly enjoyed the Nebbiolo wines he sampled in Italy.

Returning to Marseilles in early May, Jefferson then spent several leisurely and relaxing days floating up the Canal du Midi to the city of Toulouse, then down the Garrone River to the famed vineyards of Bordeaux. His time in Bordeaux was perhaps the most extraordinary of his entire journey. Among the red wines of Bordeaux, Jefferson ranked Chateau Haut-Brion, Chateau Margaux, Chateau Lafite, and Chateau Latour as the very best. Interestingly, the official 1855 classification of Bordeaux vineyards reached an identical conclusion, listing these four vineyards as the only First Growths. Another Bordeaux red that Jefferson particularly enjoyed was what he called "Rozan", which is today known as the Chateau Rausan-Segla.

Jefferson considered the wine produced at Chateau Mouton to be of the "third class" and ranked it with "common wines". This opinion stands in stark contrast to the opinion of posterity, which elevated Chateau Mouton to the level of a First Growth in 1973 (the only change from the original rankings that has ever been made). One wonders what the famously touchy Baron Phillipe de Rothschild, the owner of Chateau Mouton, would have had to say to Jefferson about his low consideration for Mouton.

Of the Bordeaux whites, Jefferson was very fond of Chateau Yquem, today the most expensive and famous of the Bordeaux white wines. Like most Bordeaux whites, it was made primarily from the Semillon grape, which is not widely produced or sold in the United States today. Interestingly, Jefferson became enamored with Chateau Yquem many decades before the accidental discovery that allowing them to be infected with botrytis cinerea, the parasite affectionately known as the "noble rot", would make them even better.

Jefferson left Bordeaux at the end of May, without visiting St. Emilion or Pomerol, today famed for their Merlot wines. Exactly why he ignored these wine regions is something of a mystery and is to be much lamented. He sailed north to the port city of Lorient and then down the Loire River back to Paris. He sampled many of the Loire wines as he went, asserting that they were good but inferior to the best wines of Bordeaux. On June 10, Jefferson finally returned to Paris and his great trip came to an end.

In a letter written shortly after his return, Jefferson said that he had "never passed three months and a half more delightfully." Indeed, it is doubtful if anyone before Jefferson had ever packed so many wine experiences into such an extensive trip in such a short time. Between the end of February and the beginning of June, the future president had explored the wine regions of Burgundy, the Rhone Valley, northern Italy, Bordeaux, and the Loire Valley, sampling wine at virtually every stop. What he learned on this amazing journey elevated him from being a mere lover of wine into one of the greatest wine connoisseurs in the history of the world.

(Two wonderful books to which readers can turn for more detailed about this amazing journey, and Jefferson's love of wine in general, are Passions: The Wines and Travels of Thomas Jefferson by James Gabler and Thomas Jefferson on Wine by John Hailman.)

Jefferson's trip was more than a personal odyssey. Throughout his travels, Jefferson established relationships with wine merchants and vintners who became lifelong friends. Chief among these was Etienne Parent, a wine merchant in the town of Beaune who would later provide Jefferson with a constant flow of Burgundy wines to be served at the tables of Monticello and the White House. He also established personal contacts with many of the great wine merchants of Bordeaux. The informal network that Jefferson formed during his journey formed the foundation of the export trade of French wines to the United States, which has continued ever since.

In a very real sense, then, the great expedition Thomas Jefferson undertook to explore the vineyards and wineries of France and northern Italy in 1787 marked the birth of the American love affair with fine wine.

What If D-Day Had Failed?

The Allied amphibious landing in Normady on June 6, 1944, is one of the most legendary military operations of all time and one of the most dramatic events of the Second World War. It has a particular resonance for Americans, for while the British tend to remember their great victory in the skies in the Battle of Britain, we Americans tend to recall our brave men storming ashore on Omaha Beach. Cinematic masterpieces such as The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan make this perfectly clear.

The success of the American, British, and Canadian armies on D-Day opened the way for the Allies to liberate France, press into the Low Countries, and ultimately invade Germany itself. It also forced the Germans to pull badly needed units from the Eastern Front and thereby assisted the Soviet Union in its own offensive against the Germans. In the end, the D-Day invasion was one of the most successful operations in military history.

But what if the D-Day landings had failed?

An Allied failure on the Normady beaches was far from impossible. Amphibious landings are among the most tricky of all military operations, requiring nearly perfect planning and a good deal of luck if they are to succeed. As a counterpoint to the success of D-Day, one has only to look at the utter fiasco that was the invasion of Gallipoli during the First World War. In that failed operation, the British, French, and ANZAC troops were contained on the beaches by the Turkish defenders, suffered enormous casualties in several months of fighting, and ultimately had to be evacuated, having achieved none of their objectives. Could the same disaster have befallen the men landing on Normandy in 1944?

General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander at Normandy, certainly thought defeat was a possibility. Indeed, he drafted a public letter that was to be released in the event that the invasion failed. Here is the full text:

Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and placed was based on the best information available. The troops, the air, and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.

There were many scenarios in which the Allied invasion of Normandy could have failed. As Eisenhower hints in his letter, the timing of the invasion was crucial. The plan required attacking when there was both a full moon and a spring tide, limiting Eisenhower's options considerably and making the question of the weather conditions paramount. The weather in the English Channel is notoriously unpredictable and played a major role in the planning of the operation. Eisenhower's original plan called for the landings to take place in mid-May. Bad weather forced a postponement. Eisenhower then selected June 5, but again the weather was poor. By ordering the invasion to go forward on June 6, when his meteorologists told him there was a chance of good weather, Eisenhower was taking an enormous gamble.

If the weather had been bad on June 6, the outcome could have been a complete disaster for the Allies. Many of the landing craft were swamped and sank on June 6, carrying many Allied soldiers to a watery grave. If a driving rainstorm had been taking place, this fate would surely have befallen many more. If the seas had been rougher, the soldiers would have had much more difficulty disembarking from their landing craft, making them easy targets for German artillery and machine guns. Air support and naval gunfire, so critical to the success of the operation, would have been greatly hindered by poor visibility if the weather had been poor. Rather than creating successful lodgments on each of the five beaches, the coast of Normandy might have remained in German hands by the end of the day. Even had they succeeded in securing a beachhead in poor weather, the Allied forces would have been considerably weaker in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, leaving them perilously vulnerable to a German counter attack.

Alternately, had Eisenhower blinked and postponed the landing yet again, the next time the lunar and tidal situation would have allowed for a landing was two weeks later. As it turned out, this would have been in the midst of a severe Channel storm which would have certainly led to yet another postponement. If such delays had continued, it would not have been outside the realm of possibility for the entire year of 1944 being lost to the Western Allies.

There are many factors other than the weather, of course. Within striking distance of the Normandy beaches were three powerful German armored formations: the 21st Panzer Division, the 12th SS Panzer Division, and the Panzer Lehr Division. Due to a variety of poor German command decisions, only one of these - the 21st Panzer Division - was actually committed to combat on June 6. Had the Germans reacted quickly and effectively, all three divisions could have been used in a powerful counter attack. This would have posed a very serious problem for the Allies, who had enough trouble getting off the beaches as it was. If combined with a scenario of worse weather, the Allied forces on the beaches might well have been destroyed.

Another major failure of the German high command, most especially of Adolf Hitler himself, was believing that the Allies invasion of France would take place at Pas de Calais, far to the northeast of Normandy. The brilliant Allied deception plan, known as Operation Fortitude, succeeded so amazingly that the Germans continued to believe that Pas de Calais was the true Allied objective even after Operation Overlord had begun. In their minds, the landing in Normandy was merely a diversion. As a result, a powerful Germany army sat quietly around Pas de Calais, awaiting an Allied landing that never came, even as their outnumbered comrades were fighting desperately in Normandy.

Had the Germans realized that the invasion of Normandy was the real deal, whether before or immediately after the landings took place, the Allied forces in Normandy would have been faced with a considerably larger and more powerful Germany army. Considering the difficulties the Allies had historically, this development would have been very grave, indeed.

An Allied failure on D-Day could take one of two forms. The Allies might have had to evacuate the beaches altogether and withdraw their forces to England, which was the scenario Eisenhower envisioned. For the Allies, this would have been a disaster that defied any attempt at description. Alternatively, they might simply have remained trapped in their beachhead. Historically, even after the great success of the June 6 landings, the Allied forces were unable to break out of the Normandy beachhead for nearly two months, during which time they suffered heavy casualties in bloody fighting. If bad weather had disrupted the landing or if the German forces facing them had been stronger, the Allies might have found themselves with a smaller and less defensible beachhead. Could they have been pinned against the beach until winter brought an end to active campaigning for the year? Might they have suffered even heavier casualties than they did historically?

What would have been the consequences of an Allied failure on D-Day?

There can be no doubt whatsoever that Germany would still have lost the Second World War. Defeating the Allied at Normandy would not change the fact that Germany had already lost air superiority over Europe, leaving their cities completely vulnerable to the ever-increasing numbers of American and British bombers. The Western Allies had long since established themselves in Italy and, in August of 1944, invaded southern France. Conceivably, the forces which would have otherwise been allocated to the invasion of Normandy would instead have gone to those two sectors, placing the German forces there under an even greater strain.

There is a further consideration. If the Germans had still been fighting during the summer of 1945, two new Allied weapons would have made their appearance in Europe: the B-29 bomber and the atomic bomb. If the Germans had staved off defeat by winning the battle on the beaches of Normandy, the result might have been German cities being transformed into piles of radioactive rubble a year or so later.

But even if we could wave a magic wand and remove the Americans and British from the war altogether, Germany would still have eventually been crushed by the power of the Soviet Union. It's often forgotten by Westerners, by the biggest German defeat in the summer of 1944 took place not in Normandy, but in Eastern Europe. On June 22, 1944, the Soviets unleashed Operation Bagration, shattering the German Army in the East and bringing the Russians into Poland. The Germans suffered far heavier casualties as a result of Operation Bagration than the did as a result of the Allied invasion of Normandy.

Had the Germans defeated the Allies in Normandy, they would certainly have been able to shift much of their army in the West to fight against the Soviets in the East, but it is unlikely that this would have made much of a difference in the end. By 1944, the Soviet war machine dwarfed that of Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union by itself was producing more war material than Germany, the Soviet Air Force had achieved a clear superiority over the Luftwaffe, and the Red Army was fielding vastly greater numbers of troops, tanks, and artillery than were the Germans. Moreover, as the great victories at Stalingrad and Kursk had demonstrated, the Soviet military leadership had become truly formidable.

By 1944, the Soviet Union was perfectly capable of defeating Nazi Germany without the help of the Western Allies. If the Allies had failed in Normandy, the war might have lasted longer and cost more in blood and treasure. But by the summer of 1944, the eventual defeat of Germany was no longer in doubt.

The question we should ask is how far would the Red Army have gotten in Europe had the British and Americans been defeated on D-Day. Rather than stopping at the Elbe as they did historically, could they have gotten to the Rhine, or conceivably all the war to the English Channel? As was proven by actual events, once the Red Army took control of a place, they did not make a habit of leaving it. The Allied soldiers who stormed ashore at Normandy on D-Day might not have realized it, but they were fighting to keep Europe out of Stalin's clutches no less than they were fighting to free it from Hitler's.

If the D-Day landings had failed, Germany would still have gone down to defeat within the next year or so. The defeat might have come at the hands of American B-29s armed with nuclear weapons or at the hands of the Red Army, but it surely would have come. But this is certainly not to say that the sacrifices of the men who fought in Normandy were meaningless, for their brilliant success undoubtedly shortened the way by many months and thereby saved innumerable lives. They prevented Europe from falling to the dark forces of Soviet Communism and, perhaps ironically, saved unknown numbers of German cities from suffering the fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And for that, the world will forever be in their debt.

Save Princeton

Washington's crossing of the Delaware River on Christmas Night of 1776 is one of the most iconic historical events that the American nation holds within its collective memory. Arguably the most famous painting in America depicts the crossing, albeit with massive inaccuracies. Most educated Americans have heard the tale of the surprise attack that caught the Hessians in Trenton completely by surprise (because they were hung over from drinking too much at Christmas dinner, at least according to legend). After several months of disastrous defeats, with the Revolution tittering on the brink of collapse, Washington's brilliant and daring strategy restored faith that America might actually win the war.

But Trenton was only the first of two American victories during that epic winter campaign. Less well-known, perhaps unfairly, was the battle that took place a few days after the crossing, a few miles to the northeast, at Princeton, New Jersey.

The story is dramatic.  The British were enraged by Washington's success at Trenton and moved swiftly against him. But Washington eluded the enemy at Assunpink Creek during the night of January 2, leaving his campfires burning to deceive the enemy and pushing his men out onto the roads for a night march. Quickly moving north around the British left flank and pushing deep behind enemy lines, the Americans arrived at Princeton in the morning. A fierce battle erupted between the Americans and the British regiments that were passing through the town.

By the standards of later conflicts, it was a not a big battle. 4,500 Americans faced off against 1,200 British troops. In the American Civil War, it would have been considered a medium-sized skirmish. Yet it was a fiercely contested engagement and the outcome of the American Revolution was going to be determined by its outcome. At first, the British appeared to have the advantage. General Hugh Mercer, one of the unsung heroes of the American Revolution, valiantly fought with his saber until being struck down by a dozen bayonets. Mercer's brigade broke under the British onslaught, for the redcoats at Princeton were some of the finest infantry in the world. American militiamen under General John Cadwalader appeared, but they also collapsed in a rout. It appeared that the British were about the win a decisive victory. If they did, it would surely result in the destruction of Washington's army and the end of the American Revolution.

It was at this moment that Washington himself appeared on horseback. It was a dramatic event, tailor-made for a Hollywood epic. A British bullet could have killed Washington in an instant, and with him the hopes and dreams of the infant American republic, yet no bullet touched him. With him were Virginia and New England Continentals, who took up good positions and poured volley after volley into the ranks of their British enemies. Stunned by the sudden turn of events, the British ranks broke and fled. The Americans had triumphed.

Just a week after their sensational triumph over the Hessians at Trenton, the Continentals had smashed a force of British redcoats and sent them fleeing. The effects were nothing short of dazzling. The British retreated almost all the way back to New York City, abandoning New Jersey back into the hands of the rebels. From New Hampshire to Georgia, the spirit of liberty and independence was restored as news of the victory spread.

Had the Americans lost the Battle of Princeton, it is quite likely that Washington would have lost his army and the last chance of an American victory in the Revolutionary War would have been snuffed out. The men who fought and died on that ground deserve the thanks of their nation.

Which is why I'm writing this blog post.

As Americans, it is incumbent upon us to protect and preserve the ground on which our ancestors fought and died. Much of the ground on which the Battle of Princeton was fought is today under terrible threat from developers who want to take the sacred soil and turn it into residential units. Although a fine battlefield park, run by the State of New Jersey rather than the National Park Service, currently protects and preserves 681 acres of the battlefield, the rest has little or no legal protections at all.

The Institute for Advanced Study, a division of Princeton University, wants to build residential units on a critical 7-acre portion of the battlefield. I happen to be quite fond of the Institute for Advanced Society, which has been the home of scientists as eminent at Freeman Dyson, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and the great Albert Einstein himself. Yet its cavalier attitude towards the sacred ground of the Princeton battlefield is disgraceful and a stain upon the honor and dignity of a venerable institution. If it goes forward with its plans, and prevails in the legal disputes currently ongoing, history will neither forget or forgive what it did and its future reputation will be damaged beyond repair. For its own good and for the good of society, the Institute for Advanced Study should immediately renounce its plans to build homes on the sacred soil of the Princeton battlefield.

You can help save the priceless soil of the Princeton battlefield by supporting the Save Princeton effort of Campaign 1776, a national effort to preserve and protect battlefields of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The men who fought and died upon that ground in the early days of 1777 were fighting for our liberty and independence. The least we can do is ensure that the ground upon which they fought is preserved as an eternal monument to their sacrifice. Even a small financial donation can make a big difference.

Do it for them. After all, they did far more for you.