Military Loonies
"Hey, all you history buffs - what was the model name of those little forts the British built before WWII in Egypt, and I think in Trans-Jordan as well?”
Martello Towers, I think.
Posted by MrsJ
08/06/2009 at 06:07 PM
Interesting article, though I’m not so sure NATO is as toothless as many think. Certainly, their actions in Afghanistan are less than stellar, but that may be due to political pressures and Europe’s conception of it as “not their war” than anything else. The only guaranteed way to asses that is to see how they act if/when the Russian steamroller DOES come in from the East.
As for the fortifications, I must ask you to qualify the question. By “type”, do you mean type of model (how the forts were arraigned, their firepower, etc), or do you want to know the model name itself?
In addition, you should bear in mind that many of the interbellum British forts in Egypt and the Middle East were actually not of British make at all, but were Turkish or German that were taken over following the defeat of the Central Powers in the Middle East, including many of those captured partially finished or incomplete, after which they were usually finished (which may or may not be what you are referring to, given that I have seen some pop up as being “built by the British"). If you want to know what these models, than we will be in considerably greater difficulty, given the lack of data about late Ottoman forts. This gets even worse when we consider that many forts were not so much built as they were redone, with the British modernizing what was already there (I have actually seen Sollum being called a Libyan city and Bir Hakeim the location of a French fort. In the former case, Sollum was an Egyptian city the Germans captured and fortified in 1940 before being wiped out during Operation Compass, while in the later Bir Hakeim was not a French fort but a Turkish fort the French modernized). While some Martello Towers may have been used, they were almost certainly not used widely in Egypt (more in South Africa, Canada, and India).
However, if we are talking strictly British forts in the interbellum, we still have some trouble. The simple fact is that British records on fortifications during this period usually focus on Britain itself and/or- if one is lucky- India and the “Fortress cities” (like Singapore) of the Far East. However, from what data I can tell, the British usually built the forts with memories of WWI and the Senussi Revolt (and later the Palestinian revolts and the skirmishes with the Yemenis and the Saudi Ikwahn) in mind: usually one major fortification (likely a pre-existing structure, if not a “citadel” built as a nerve center), around which they would create a trench system branching out like roots from the “citadel”, which would usually lead to various bunkers or foxholes that they would use to conduct the majority of the defense with. Very WWI-ish, and not unlike other forts you would see in that era. I’m not sure if there is a proper name for it, but that is more or less what you would find usually.
Posted by Turtler
08/06/2009 at 07:24 PM
For Afghanistan, I’d take the word of the guys on the ground before that of the media. Even though those down in the dust can’t see the big picture.
BBC is reporting a big victory in their latest campaign over there. Most excellent if true.
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No, they were little forts, perhaps more like police stations. And, now that I think about it, it would have been more in the Palestine / Trans Jordan area. Perhaps even Israel too before it’s founding. We’re talking Balfour Declaration eras, Allenby Bridge times, up until post WWII maybe. During the uprisings in that area, late 20s to mid 50s, the troops had to retreat to these places for safety, while all sorts of arab-arab crap went on around them. The name of the style of station/fort/bastion almost became a verb, to mean an enemy who was safely encapsulated in your midst. Armed, but toothless and immobile.
Hmmm ... anybody got a copy of Uris’ The Haj? Historical fiction, I know, but I seem to recall these were mentioned in there too. It’s just one of those terms that slips my mind. I know they were named after their inventor.
HA! I knew it was in there somewhere! The things were called TEGART FORTS. And were occupied by the (British staffed) Palestine Police Force, not the British Army. (although my guess is the difference between the PPF and the RA was shades of gray and a different uniform)
Mrs J - Ooh, very nice! I’d forgotten all about those. Cannon ball resistant, 2 to 4 gun micro-forts big enough for a squad or two of troops.
The ones I was thinking of came about 100 years after that.
Ah, Tegart Forts. Almost forgot about those. Now I see the problem: I was thinking far more conventionally, far more rural, and far further to the West, in Egypt.
Tegart “Forts”, you should know, are not like forts as we would commonly understand them. They are far closer to fortified posts or buildings.
So scrap what I said (which applies far more to Egypt, the Sudan, Libya, and Iraq). Unless these things were part of a larger defensive perimeter (like the Tegart Line, built to cut the Mufti of Jerusalem and his supporters of from their local allies in Syria and Transjordan), you wouldn’t see a whole lot of wire, pill boxes, or trenches used in them. This was basically a single fortified building- MAYBE with some underground tunnels here and there- designed to be innocuous on the outside (maybe you would have a checkpoint, a small motor pool, and some guards, but that’s it), but to be damn near impenetrable on the inside, particularly to a large but ill-equipped enemy.
The way these things were usually made was by pouring reinforced concrete and a couple layers of steel on the site you wanted, and than carving out the interior to be quite nasty indeed. You would have a few “murder holes” (both facing outside the building and inside the building itself) with which to fire through, you would have your armory (without exception deep inside the base, as the British believed- correctly- that the Arab and Jewish radicals they would be fighting didn’t have the engineering skill to cut through to them from the outside), a radio station, and possibly some light artillery for the more reinforced units. They were quite suitable for what they were intended to be, if Panzer Armee Afrika had gotten that far East, they probably would have been wiped out relatively easily, but when facing a few thousand poorly armed tribal leeves, they were godsends, and many were in fact used by the Israelis and the Arabs after the 1948 pullout.
As for the Palestinian Police, you might be right to an extent, but the Police units were also far more civil units than militarized ones, save during the Mufti’s uprising from 36-39, and also had several Palestinian detachments, both Jewish and Arab, on the roles.
On another note, to be fair to the Arabs, while 1936 certainly was “arab-arab”, after the Mufti of Jerusalem tried to violently unite the Palestinian Arabs under his command while simultaneously ejecting the British and the Jews (he failed. BADLY), 1929 and 1947 were very much Arab-Jew.
And indeed, I have read Uris’ The Haj, in addition to Mila 18, Exodus, OB VII, and Trinity. Not bad by any means, but I’ve read better. In addition, I’ve always felt that the 36-39 revolt has been given short shrift in the West (perhaps due to the lack of moral equivalence, or its minimal direct impact, or its small scale, or maybe a combination of all of them), but in many ways it is almost as relevant to the history, as it shows the bloody, dirty formation of the PLO, in spirit if not in name or exact structure.
Posted by Turtler
08/07/2009 at 02:49 AM
Almost forgot: one thing you should know about Uris and might find troubling is that he is a MASSIVE apologist for the Irish terror organizations. Hell, Trinity (the parts that I read of it, that is) practically read as a love letter not so much to the Irish (though to be fair to Uris, he had some of that too) but to the IRA.
You should be careful about that.
Posted by Turtler
08/07/2009 at 03:00 AM
Uris is a storyteller, and a good one. But what he is telling is stories, bent and embellished. Yes, a lot of it is based on historical events, but they aren’t a chronicle of those times. His book, The Haj, was simply one place that I had seen mention of these buildings.
And a fair amount of the things that he wrote about in that book, about generalized arabic behavior, are true. He wrote about radicals hiding arms in mosques way back then ... and lo and behold, come Gulf War II, the media was shocked, just shocked!, that such a thing could happen.
I agree about his take on the IRA. But for a long, long time, the IRA had quite a lot of under the table support in the USA. Very few people looked at their Socialist/Communist ideology, or at any actual details of their behavior. They only saw them as freedom fighters against an oppressive outside government.