Urban Warfare in the Twenty-First Century by Anthony King

Author:Anthony King [King, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2021-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

7

Fire

Flames

Fire has always been a central element of urban warfare. An ancient siege typically culminated in the looting and burning of the city. Indeed, the archaeological evidence testifies to the ubiquity of fire in urban warfare. The city of Hamoukar, in north-eastern Syria, was destroyed by fire in 3500 BCE.1 Nineveh’s acropolis mound of Kuyunjik, all its great palaces and temples show clear evidence of incineration in 612 BCE, including vitrified cuneiform tablets.2 Fire was not only used to burn cities once they had been taken; it was employed extensively throughout antiquity as an offensive weapon. In his treatise on siege warfare, Aineias the Tactitian was convinced that, in siege warfare, fire was a prime weapon.3 Indeed, the Greeks developed an incendiary weapon that seemed to have been an early form of napalm. At the siege of Plataea, in 428 BCE at the start of the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans, under Archidamus II, piled brushwood, covered with sulphur, pitch and possibly arsenic, along the wall, while throwing as much brush over the wall in an effort to spread the fire – ‘this fire, however, was indeed a very big one, and it very nearly finished the Plataeans off’.4 At the siege of Parium (c. 362–359 BCE), Iphiades of Abydus ordered his troops to fill wagons with twigs and roll them up to the walls, where they were ignited. Once the flames had spread to the gates, Iphiades’ soldiers took advantage of the distraction to scale the walls at another point and take the city.5 Fire was central to Chinese warfare: ‘From the Warring States onward it became a crucial part of Chinese theory and practice.’6 Fire was equally effective in defence, destroying the weapons and equipment of besiegers. For instance, the Thebans used a flame-thrower against Athenian attackers at Delium:7 ‘By attaching a bellows to an iron-plated, hollowed-out wooden beam with a curved iron tube that reached from a cauldron of fire through the beam, the Boeotians were able to blow an intense flame through the beam against the wooden walls of the Athenian camp.’8

Fire itself has always been an important siege weapon, then. However, siege warfare presented attackers with a distinctive problem: they had to get into the city; they had to breach the walls or batter down the gates. Here, fire alone was less useful unless they could burn down the gate itself (as Iphiades tried to do at Parium) or the walls were made of wood. In order to destroy walls and fortifications, battering rams and catapults, employing kinetic energy, were vital. Although many of the weapons and techniques already existed, and Assyrian kings took great pride in their role as takers and destroyers of cities;9 the Assyrians became adept at using battering rams and mines. When he took Lachish in 701 BCE, Sennacherib employed both methods to breach the walls and assault the city, as palace friezes in Nineveh show. The Assyrians employed relatively crude kinetic weapons. However, in Greek city-states major advancements in siege technology were made as catapults were developed; later, mangonels and trebuchets appeared.

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