Harfleur to Hamburg: five centuries of English and British violence in Europe
edited by DJB Trim and Brendan Simms, Hurst, £38.80

THIS splendid book takes 11 case studies of English and British violence in Europe: Henry V’s wars in France, Henry VIII’s wars, the atrocities in the reign of Elizabeth I, the subjection of early modern Ireland, the violence in Scotland after the 1746 Battle of Culloden, the bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, the violence against civilians during the Peninsular War of 1807-14, the Baltic campaign of the Crimean War, 1854-56, the blockade in the first world war, the attack on the French fleet at Mers-El-Kebir in 1940, and the 1943 bombing of Hamburg and other German cities.

The editors sum up: “England and then Great Britain inflicted extreme violence on its European neighbours, even when still using the rhetoric of neighbourliness and friendship.”

Henry VIII invaded France five times: in 1512, 1513, 1522, 1523 and 1544, and attacked Scotland in 1513, 1523 and 1544. Neil Murphy concludes his fine study of these wars: “Destroying the land to create famine conditions was central to British military strategy. ... Scorched earth, famine, and massacre were styles of violence the English used at their most severe against fellow Europeans from countries such as France, which were deemed to be at the centre of ‘civilisation’.” 

Elizabeth I’s England was at war with France in 1560 and 1562-3 and with Spain from 1585 to 1603. England’s wars in Ireland included the larger conflicts of the Kildare rebellion (1534-5), the Ulster or Shane O’Neill wars (1557-62 and 1565-7), the Desmond rebellion (1579-83), and the Nine Years War (1594-1603). These were no small wars: it is estimated that 48,000 people may have died in Munster in 1579-83 as a result of the war, either directly in the fighting or from famine and disease.

On top of these larger wars, English forces were killing people in some part of Ireland every year from 1546 to 1603. David Edwards concludes that “the Tudor and Stuart conquest of Ireland may rank as one of the bloodiest phases of conflict anywhere in western Europe prior to the Thirty Years’ War.”

Mary Elisabeth Cox, in a fine study of the effects of the British blockade of Germany and her allies from July 1914 to July 1919, asks: “Who could fairly argue that a major reduction of foreign fertiliser for an agricultural economy dependent on it, in addition to 20-30 per cent of total food outright because of blockade, would not impact a state’s ability to feed its citizens?” She concludes: “There is ample evidence that the blockade against Germany was a deliberate and ‘central weapon of the war’.”

She notes that: “Research on blockades in parts of the Ottoman empire suggests that impacts on civilians there were far worse than they had been in Germany. In the area around Mount Lebanon, one third of the total population — 150,000 people — died of hunger and hunger-related disease between 1915-17. Despite less rain and locusts, ‘in no sense was the famine a ‘natural disaster’.’ Rather, the novel disease environment brought by the war, and the blockade operated by the Triple Entente Fleet, were responsible for many of those deaths.”

In July 1940, France’s Vichy government was unable and unwilling to stop Germany seizing control of the French fleet. Karine Varley writes: “De Gaulle accepted that the ships had to be destroyed to prevent them from being used by the enemy, insisting that the defeat of Britain would seal the ‘enslavement’ of France. For all the many resentments he was to hold against the British over his long political career, de Gaulle’s endorsement of the Mers-el-Kebir operation was truly remarkable. It stood as a powerful testimony to the legitimacy of the action and the British government’s justification of it.”

Air Vice-Marshal John Slessor wrote in a 1942 internal memo that while bombing German civilians was the policy, “it is unnecessary and undesirable in any document about our bombing policy to proclaim it.” Between the nights of July 24-25 and August 2-3 1943 Bomber Command carried out five large-scale raids killing some 34,000 to 37,000 people.

Charles Esdaile, in his brilliant chapter on the Peninsular War, produces a fair summary of the British empire’s record: “Let us not delude ourselves: at the beginning of the 19th century as much as at the beginning of the 18th or the beginning of the 20th, the British state was a ruthless war-machine that was wedded to the maintenance, if not extension, of its empire and had little compunction in pushing violence to its utmost bounds should it judge it necessary to do so.” 

The book’s snapshots of episodes of imperial wars indeed shows an unparalleled record of destructiveness. Only the last two episodes, both in the second world war, have any redeeming features, as parts of Britain’s just war against the Axis powers.