Marching to the Drums by Ian Knight

Author:Ian Knight [Knight, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 19th Century, Biography & Autobiography, Military, General
ISBN: 9781848322417
Google: 6WBsDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Frontline Books
Published: 2015-10-30T00:37:21+00:00

3. Policing the Empire

While the grand strategic demands of Empire led Britain into war in the Crimea, on the Indian sub-continant, and, indeed, time and again in South Africa, the steady and often unplanned growth in territorial acquisition led to constant campaigning on the very fringes of the Imperial borders. Between 1839 and the 1880s, British troops found themselves involved in a constant stream of what might today be considered ‘police actions’. Some, like the 1868 Abyssinian expedition, were self-contained campaigns, brought about by specific circumstances. Others, like the successive campaigns in New Zealand, were the result of steady settler encroachment on independent territory, for which the Crown had ultimately to pay the butcher’s bill.

Each of these campaigns tested the army in different ways. For an institution often characterised – with some justification – as inflexible and conservative, this British army was required to be remarkably flexible in the field, facing a variety of foes, each of whom had their own distinctive ways of waging war, and in a range of equally inhospitable environments. Often, British troops were outnumbered and ill-equipped for the challenge, and the start of each fresh campaign often produced a crop of disasters as a result. Yet the British army invariably learned from its mistakes, and most campaigns were brought to a successful conclusion in the end, the result not only of the technological superiority of British weapons, but of the courage, endurance and fortitude of individual soldiers in the ranks.

In the British were pre-occupied by India’s western frontier, they remained at least sensitive to events beyond its eastern boundaries, a sensitivity which brought them into conflict no less than three times with the kingdom of Ava in the steamy tropical rain-forests of Burma. Based on the central reaches of the Irrawaddy river, the kingdom of Ava was militarily robust in the nineteenth century, and pursued an expansionist policy which worried successive generations of Imperial administrators. Burmese troops had occupied the Indian border towns of Assam and Chittagong early in the century, provoking the 1st Burma War of 1824. The British lost almost as many men to heat-stroke – campaigning in jungle thickets in full-dress uniforms – as to enemy action in that expedition, but Ava’s policies remained largely unchanged, and by the 1850s tension once again threatened to spill over into violence. The arrest of two British merchant sea-captains by the Burmese was taken by the British as proof of hostile intent, and provoked a fine piece of gun-boat diplomacy. HMS Rattler was sent to bombard Burmese stockades along the Irrawaddy, an action which the Burmese not unnaturally resented. Fighting broke out, British troops were rushed to the area, and a two-year war ensued. Ordinary Seaman George Goddard was serving on the Rattler, and described the subsequent fighting, which culminated in the British assault on the Golden Pagoda, end the capture of the capital of southern Burma, Rangoon.

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