Britain's 20 Worst Military Disasters 15 - Khartoum

General Charles George Gordon was one of the loosest cannons ever to infiltrate the highest echelons of the British army.   The peace-loving Prime Minister, William Gladstone, should really have known better, but in January 1884 he hired Gordon to organise the evacuation of Egyptian garrisons from the Sudan.

In Egypt, Britain called the shots, but Sudan was a greyer area, and for more than two years, a local leader known as the ‘Mahdi’ had been on a mission to purify Islam and take over the country.

Instead of evacuating the capital, Khartoum, Gordon mounted a dramatic stand that lasted for 342 days, at the end of which the general and many others in the city were killed.   A British rescue expedition arrived just two days later, but beat a hasty retreat before the Mahdi’s overwhelming numbers.

Gordon’s ordeal was followed intently by people all over the world, and when it ended, it was Gladstone who got the blame.    His previous nickname – G.O.M. – ‘Grand Old Man’ was modified to M.O.G. – ‘Murderer of Gordon’.

War horses + 30 Years War crime

Normally this blog confines itself to human disasters, but this week I went to see the magnificent play The War Horse at the New London Theatre, and was astonished to see in the programme the figures for the number of horses killed during the First World War. One million were sent from Britain to France, and only 62,000 returned.

One of the first revelations of the conflict was that cavalry was now virtually useless, and defenceless, in the face of machine guns, artillery, barbed wire. Apart from their cavalry duties, horses were also responsible for huge amounts of the fetching, hauling and carrying that fed the war machine. Many were killed by direct attack – bullets, shells, shrapnel, poison gas – others maimed by the lethal debris lying around the battlefield.

This day….378 years ago saw the most notorious atrocity of the Thirty Years’ War – the sack of Magdeburg. After a six-month siege, the mainly Protestant city was taken by Catholic soldiers, and then, in the words of the great German writer Friedrich Schiller, there followed “a scene of horrors for which history has no language – poetry no pencil. Neither innocent childhood, nor helpless old age; neither youth, sex, rank, nor beauty, could disarm the fury of the conquerors. “

The city was burned to the ground. Perhaps 30,000 citizens were murdered while thousands of women were dragged off to the victors’ camp. The atrocity caused horror across Europe, so much so that the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor had to call off a victory celebration, and during the war’s remaining 17 years, many a Catholic soldier crying for quarter would be greeted with the retort “Magdeburg quarter!” and killed.

Bloody connected anniversaries

This day, 16 years ago, saw the Waco siege end after 51 days. The stand-off at the Branch Davidian Church’s ranch in Texas had begun on February 28, 1993 when agents from the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms tried to search the property, resulting in a gun battle in which four agents were killed.

The cult’s leader, David Koresh, had taken a number of its female members as “wives”, some of whom were teenagers. This brought allegations of child abuse, while Koresh’s launch of a business selling guns added to the disquiet. On April 19, FBI agents tried to force their way in to the compound, and up to 80 members of the group including 20 children and Koresh himself, were killed as fire engulfed it.

Exactly two years after the siege ended, on April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh detonated a huge truck bomb in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people – the United States’ biggest ever terrorist outrage before 9/11. McVeigh had spent a brief time in the army, and was decorated for bravery, but he began to fear the government was planning to abolish Americans’ constitutional right to bear arms. He went to Waco to watch the siege, and took the view that the FBI’s actions were illegal.

Soon after, he began planning the Oklahoma attack, which targeted a Federal building in the city. An hour after the explosion, McVeigh was stopped for a driving offence, and was found to be illegally carrying a concealed hand gun. He was executed in 2001, and an accomplice was sent to prison for life.