This edited article about fencing originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 704 published on 12 July 1975.

A bout with the foils

Many fencers call their sport “high speed chess” because you cannot win a proper sword fight without thinking out your moves several steps ahead of your opponent.

The dashing film actor Errol Flynn, who did as much as anybody to popularise fencing with his many exciting swashbuckling roles, once said he felt more like a ballet-dancer than an actor when rehearsing a fight sequence for the screen.

“Every move you make has to be according to a plan,” he said. “It’s worse than remembering lines – that’s why nobody ever speaks in the course of a fight.”

Duelling with swords – outlawed in Britain since the early 19th century – has a very long history. The Ancient Egyptians of over 3,000 years ago made temple carvings of men fencing.

Originally, of course, it was developed as part of the training soldiers needed to remain alive in the heat of battle and set “moves” taught to them were still being used by cavalrymen in training drills in the Victorian era.

No man armed with only a sabre could have hoped to have lived long in the Battle of Waterloo or survived the Charge of the Light Brigade without being so efficient at what is called the “Cut, thrust, parry” of swordsmanship, that he could do it in his sleep.

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This edited article about aerial warfare originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 702 published on 28 June 1975.

A Voisin downs a German Aviatik and becomes the first winner of an aerial dogfight, by Wilf Hardy

It’s hard to say who first fired a gun from an aeroplane, who was the first to hit anything, or who was the first to try shooting down an enemy plane with a machine-gun.

Certainly all the infant air forces involved in that first year of the 1914-1918 War were experimenting around the same time. Their main difficulty lay in the planes themselves. These just weren’t powerful enough to be converted into real fighting machines.

Pilots had been taking pot-shots at each other for some time. The first such duel among the clouds must have been over Neco in Mexico in 1913. There two American pilots, one flying for the Mexican Government, the other for a rebel General, exchanged a dozen or so pistol shots – without hitting anything.

The Great War had been raging for only a few weeks when, on August 25th, 1914, a British crew forced down a German Taube near Le Quesnoy by potting at it with a rifle.

October 6th that year saw the French chalk up their first victory when the crew of a Voisin shot down a German Aviatik – then landed to collect the enemy pilot’s helmet as proof of their success!

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This edited article about warplanes originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 701 published on 21 June 1975.

Lt Gavotti dropped small bombs from his plane as the Turks took pot shots at him (main picture); in 1794 the French used balloons for military observation of the Dutch (far left). Pictures by Wilf Hardy

On the waterfront of Tripoli harbour in Libya, Arab labourers sweated under the stern eyes of their new masters, the Italians.

Strange weapons of war were being unloaded from the Italian supply ship. These were the conqueror’s aeroplane flotilla – two Bleriot X1s, two Nieuport monoplanes, two Henri Farman biplanes and two Etrich Taubes.

It looked a formidable armada just to seize a desert coast from the ailing Ottoman Empire. But, helped by ferocious Senussi Arab tribesmen from the Libyan desert and volunteers on unofficial leave from the Egyptian Army, the tiny Ottoman Turkish garrisons of Libya had retreated to oases deep in the Sahara Desert from where they harried the invaders and refused all demands to surrender.

In reply the Italians threw in all the machinery of 20th-century war, including their aeroplane flotilla.

A few weeks after the Italians landed, on October 23, 1911. Captain Carlo Piazza had the distinction of making the first military reconnaissance flight in an aeroplane. Before long he had also made the first sea reconnaissance, the first photographic reconnaissance and the first night reconnaissance.

It was one of Captain Piazza’s junior officers, Second Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti, who had the dubious distinction of first raining death from the skies.

On November 1st, 1911, Lt. Gavotti took off in his Taube. With him he carried four tiny picric-acid bombs.

The Turks were used to the reconnaissance planes and were not particularly concerned as the Taube approached. This time, however, it was different. Holding the control stick between his knees, Gavotti screwed a detonator into the bomb and tossed it overboard. Three times he repeated the operation.

The air had now become an arena of war.

This edited article about Alfried Krupp originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 699 published on 7 June 1975.

To British Tommies in the Great War the very name Krupp sounded like a shrapnel burst. Picture by Frank Bellamy

The flares from the RAF Mosquito pathfinders lit up the chimneys above the huddled factory roofs. German anti-aircraft shells flashed in a dark sky criss-crossed by the white, weaving ribbons of searchlights. The roar of the approaching Lancaster bombers grew louder. Then the ground trembled as bombs blasted the huge arms plant.

In the garden of his 300-roomed mansion, Villa Hugel, on the outskirts of Essen, Alfried Krupp and his guests watched the raid. At its height, amid the roar of high explosive, he led them through a maze of corridors to his underground bunker.

In the morning, the dead and wounded in the shattered Krupps complex were counted. Most of them were inmates from concentration camps and prisoners of war forced to work for the Nazi arms machine. Krupp had no difficulty in obtaining labour: he replaced the casualties many times to maintain record weapons production despite the British night raids over the Ruhr. For Krupp dispersed his plants throughout Germany and so avoided crippling damage.

Retribution for Alfried Krupp, as for many Nazi leaders, came in 1945. On April 10, Alfried sat down to a game of skat, a German form of bridge, in which one player pits his skill against two others. Allied artillery barked around Villa Hugel yet Krupp ignored the noise and won a small fortune from his guests. The next morning, he was arrested by American troops, but not before he had kept them waiting. He refused to appear until he was impeccably dressed as befitted a Krupps senior executive.

It was two years before he and other directors were brought to trial before a United States military tribunal in Nuremberg, charged with plundering Nazi occupied lands and using 100,000 prisoners as slave labour.

On July 28, 1948, Alfried Krupp was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment and forfeiture of his entire property. But he spent only three years in jail and even there, with his imprisoned directors, he held weekly board meetings to study reports on world trade and, in particular, steel production.

The US High Commissioner in Germany, John McCloy, announced on July 31, 1951, that Alfried Krupp’s sentence had been revised, following a review of the evidence and a reappraisal of personal guilt. He was freed and the confiscation order revoked, signalling once again the rise of the Krupps empire.

The British had always thought of the Krupps family as the sinister armourers of the Kaiser in the First World War and Hitler’s merchants of death in the second one. On the other hand, the Germans had always regarded them with respect and esteem as the founders of social security in the early 1800s, when they created a comprehensive welfare scheme with pensions for the factory workers. It was a family with a proud history dating back to the 16th century, the mainspring of German industrial and social development, creating armaments down the centuries along with other heavy industrial goods that gave them untold millions.

But it was not until the 1800s, that Krupps began to dominate the German industrial and political stage.

When Friedrich Krupp died on October 8, 1826, he left his 14-year-old son, Alfred, the secret of making high quality cast steel with a small workshop in which production was almost at a standstill.

Despite his youth, Alfred accepted the challenge. He took complete charge of the firm. It prospered under his guidance with production expanding after four years to include the manufacture of steel rolls.

Alfred designed and developed new machines, invented a system for making spoons and forks and devised plant for turning out currency. At the first world exhibition in London in 1851, he put on show the largest steel ingot ever cast, weighing 4,300 lb.

With the appearance of railways, Krupp really expanded, turning out rolling stock, establishing collieries, ore mines, blast furnaces and even setting up a laboratory for testing steel. In fact, just to prove how good it was, he decided, like his relatives before him, to turn to making guns.

At first, no one in Europe was interested in his weapons. It was not until 1856 that the first orders came from Egypt. Belgium bought Krupp cannon in 1861 and Russian orders arrived two years later.

When Krupp guns thundered in the Franco-German war of 1870-71, the firm was nicknamed: “The Arsenal of the Reich.” Yet the output of peaceful goods always outpaced the production of armaments in those early days. And all the time, Alfred Krupp kept a benevolent eye on his workers, building houses, hospitals, schools and churches for them. When his father died, there were a mere seven workers in the small Krupp workshop. When Alfred died in Essen on July 14, 1887 he had 21,000 employees.

Under the direction of his son, Friedrich, the firm continued to expand. By the time he died in November, 1902, the staff had doubled. Then the pattern of control began to change. For Friedrich left two daughters, the eldest of whom, Bertha, became the sole heiress.

In 1906, she married Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, a diplomat, who was subsequently authorised by Kaiser William II to change his name to Krupp, the right to be carried on by his heirs.

To British Tommies in the World War One trenches, the very name of Krupp sounded like a shrapnel burst. By then, Krupp had 151,000 workers turning out fantastic amounts of arms, including the huge guns that bombarded Paris from 75 miles away in 1918. They were named “Big Bertha” after Gustav’s wife.

In the aftermath of war, Krupp manufactured more rolling stock, locomotives, lorries and, of course, weapons. In politics, Gustav was always wily and ready to support the ruling power. He backed Hindenburg against Hitler and changed promptly to throw his weight behind the Nazi leader when he took control. Gustav was believed to have served on various Nazi organisations; he certainly received titles and awards, including the gold party badge.

But as the last war wore on, the tall aristocratic figure with the spade beard and moustache ailed and his son, Alfried, assumed increasing control of the firm.

Gustav was, in fact too senile to be prosecuted with war crimes after the Allied victory, although charges were considered. He died while his son was in prison.

When the Krupp factories were ultimately returned to Alfried, he was ordered by the Allies to sell off his iron and steel properties. But the order was never carried out. Alfried Krupp always pleaded failure to find a buyer and after the order had been extended repeatedly, it was finally lifted altogether.

Alfried Krupp, who died in 1967 when the firm had a turnover of £475 million, created from the ashes of war a new future for the Krupp empire. In 1973, it made a net profit of £16 million, boasted a total sales bill of £1,612 million and a work force of 70,000.

There are more than 150 factories and mines producing 12 per cent of the Ruhr steel and making every kind of machine from ships to diesel engines. And there are the weapons and the roses and orchids, too.

The weapons are made for NATO. And the flowers? The roses and orchids come from the lush grounds of Villa Hugel in their hundreds of thousands. Even the most beautiful and delicate of blooms make money for the Krupps.

This edited article about absurd military ideas originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 698 published on 31 May 1975.

Unlike crazy ideas for weapons of attack, the eccentric pigeon post proved reliable during the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71

Terrible as war always is, it does have its lighter moments. Inventors can usually be guaranteed to provide some laughs, which they certainly did in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. The Prussians and their German allies (for there was no such thing as a united Germany until 1871), had it all their own way at first, but in September 1870, found themselves besieging Paris. Not until January 1871, did the city capitulate, before which a number of would-be geniuses had come up with marvellous schemes for defeating the hated enemy.

One of the more fatuous ideas was to unleash the most ferocious wild animals of the Paris zoo against the Prussians, though how the lions and tigers were expected to stand up to the finest infantry and artillery in Europe was not explained. Another genius said that the Seine should be poisoned at the point where it flowed out of Paris, which, even if it had been practical, would have done more harm to the French than the enemy.

An even more inspired “non-event” was the musical machine gun. The non-musical version was a not very good ancestor of the machine gun, but the tuneful piece of artillery would, so its inventor thought, be far more effective. Trading on the fact that all Germans were supposed to be musical, his gun would lure the enemy forward by playing suitable airs of Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart. When the Prussians were within range, they would be decimated by the “non-musical” part of the gun.

The most famous idea was not so much daft as ahead of its time, and carried through so badly that all Paris mocked its originator.

His name was Felix Belly and he decided to create the “Amazons of the Seine”, ten battalions of them in fancy uniforms.

Alas for poor Monsieur Belly, the men of Paris did not approve, and they came to jeer and hoot outside the recruiting office. There were ugly rumours that he had been charging exorbitant entrance fees, and the whole scheme collapsed.

This edited article about Kung-fu originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 697 published on 24 May 1975.

The Boxer Rebellion brought about the siege of the British legation in Peking by Andrew Howat

Bands of men could be seen carrying out a strange ritual all over the Shantung province of China in the year 1900. They were bowing, stamping and knocking their heads on the ground with their bodies facing the south-east.

Under the exhortation of their leader, these men would work themselves into a trance-like frenzy in which they believed they were immune to bullets or swords.

Finally, in their thousands, they would hurl themselves at the homes and offices of the Europeans living in Peking, determined at all costs to throw the “foreign devils” into the sea.

These were the I Ho Chuan, or “Fists of Righteous Harmony”, better known as The Boxers, the most famous army of kung-fu fighters in history.

Skilled, fearless and fanatical, the Boxers proved no match for Western fire power. Peking was besieged for 55 days, and when the city was finally relieved, the great mass of peasant-fighters melted away, leaving thousands of casualties behind them.

Puzzled and dismayed, they felt themselves betrayed by their leaders, who had sworn that nothing could harm them. What had gone wrong? The great kung-fu teachers of the past would have had a ready enough answer: the secrets of China’s great martial art had been divulged to non-Buddhists and those who were not “gentle and merciful.” And, of course, utter disaster had been the result.

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This edited article about crazy military inventions originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 697 published on 24 May 1975.

Nesting seagulls

War brings forward plenty of crazy inventions as well as good ones. At the beginning of the Second World War, death rays were all the rage. The trouble was that none of them worked until the terrible atomic bomb made its ghastly debut in 1945.

Incredible schemes in this century, which never got off the ground in more ways than one, have included shells filled with poisonous snakes. When you come to think about it, this would not have been the easiest of things to arrange, and was liable to have backfired if the snakes had decided to crawl back to your own trench. Even the revolting use of poisonous gas, which was tried to such deadly effect, sometimes went wrong when the wind suddenly changed and blew the gas back to the user.

The prize for a silly idea must go to the seagull scheme, which went like this. First build yourself a fleet of dummy submarines, then let their non-dummy guns fire grain into the air, which would then be swallowed by excited seagulls.

From then on, when the seagulls have been taught to identify submarines with a good tuck-in, any real enemy “sub” that surfaces will be besieged by frantic birds, waiting for their free rations. “Ho, ho!” think the gunners on shore, seeing a cloud of seagulls out to sea. “There must be a submarine on the surface.” Not surprisingly, it was never tried.

This edited article about Hiroshima originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 696 published on 17 May 1975.

Hiroshima

The citizens of Hiroshima were worried. And with good cause. For weeks now, the American bombers had carried out massive air raids on every major city and town in Japan with the exceptions of Kyoto and their own city.

It was possible, they knew, that Kyoto might continue to be spared because of its historical place in Japanese culture. But a commercially important town like Hiroshima, with its busy seaport, which was, moreover, being used as a transport base, could expect no such mercy. Soon now, therefore, it was inevitable that the bombers would come with their incendiaries which could wipe out half the town in a single raid.

The Government had done everything in its power to reduce the horrors that would follow in the wake of the bombers. Thousands had been persuaded to move into the country, and thousands more were packing their belongings to follow them, the schools had been closed, and the pupils had been set to work helping in the massive task of pulling down every building that constituted a fire hazard. Wide swathes, making natural fire breaks, now intersected the city at all points, a visible proof of their efforts.

Everything that could be done, had been done. But everyone knew in their hearts that it was not enough. It was the day of August 5th, 1945, the day before Hiroshima died.

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This edited article about Kendo and the Samurai originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 695 published on 10 May 1975.

Samurai warrior by Dan Escott

Karate, judo and kung-fu have been improved and adapted over the years, but they still exist in what is recognisably their original form, Kendo, “the way of the sword”, had very different beginnings, for it springs from an armed instead of an unarmed martial art.

“The way of the sword” was a vital phrase in a samurai warrior’s life, for it summed up the almost mystical feelings he had about his weapon. His own swordsmanship and the reputation of his terrible, two-handed fighting blade were all important, for to a samurai his sword was not just something to fight with. It was a prized family possession, an heirloom to be passed reverently from father to son and generally considered to have a “spirit” of its own.

Not surprisingly, the business of ordering a sword in old Japan was a serious matter, and the price was unimportant so long as the workmanship was of the best. But how did a samurai decide what was the best? Usually a new sword was subjected to very stringent tests. A famous warrior is said to have visited the workshops of many of the great 13th century swordmakers in search of a flawless weapon, and at each he was given an impressive demonstration of what each blade could do.

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This edited article about martial arts originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 693 published on 26 April 1975.

Japanese martial arts include kendo and judo by Pat Nicolle

“If you think of saving your life,” one of Japan’s ancient heroes is supposed to have said. “You had better not go to war at all.”

And according to the medieval Japanese warrior’s code of honour, this made sense. Nothing was more desirable than to find death on the field of battle and a first class fighting man was expected to concentrate on his job twenty four hours a day. If he allowed himself any outside interests, such as a home and family, this was considered a serious disadvantage.

The great tradition of the professional warrior started in Japan at about the same time as the Normans were invading England. Before that, there had been a long period of peace and elegance. Then two of the most powerful families in the country became locked in a struggle for power that rapidly broke into open war.

What followed was not unlike the Wars of the Roses, with noblemen throughout the land joining forces with some even more powerful lord in order to fight more effectively on one side or the other. And out of this period of chaos and bloodshed emerged a new kind of soldier, the samurai.

“A samurai should live and die with a sword in his hand,” it was said. And most of this elite band of professional soldiers did just that. Each serving his own feudal master, they were, in many ways, similar to the knights of Europe, except that the latter’s code of chivalry extended to more than just the rules of war.

The samurai’s code was called bushido, “the way of the warrior”, and was a soldier’s rule-book, pure and simple. It produced what was probably the most frightening class of highly trained killers the world has ever seen.

Being a samurai meant that you were a member of an exclusive club, something that you were either born into or had qualified for after the most rigorous training and tests. Because these super-warriors each owed allegiance to his own war lord, they often had to fight each other.

But the fact that they might be on opposite sides did not lower their respect for each other. When they fought it was to the accompaniment of an elaborate ritual in which the winner of the fight was expected to praise his opponent’s bravery before he ceremoniously cut off his head.

The training of a samurai was long and almost unbelievably tough, being designed to make a pupil proof against any physical discomfort and totally fearless of death. He was taught to disregard hunger, to tramp barefoot through snow and to kill himself if he felt that he had broken the bushido code of honour. Then, when he was mentally prepared for his life as a “gentleman warrior”, he was taught the skills of his profession, known as the martial arts.

To be simply skilled in the martial arts was not enough, for a samurai considered that it was always the way in which a thing was done that mattered. Any peasant could have brute strength, so a samurai was taught from the very beginning that the superior warrior should show his skill by gentleness, remembering that “fine steel bends before springing back, while cast iron breaks”.

Even a samurai’s armour was made with this teaching in mind, so for him there was no protection of massive metal plates that weighed a man down so much that he could hardly walk. Instead, Japanese armour was made up of scores of small iron scales held together by silk cords. The result was a light but extremely tough form of protection that could be depended upon not to weigh down a horse nor hamper a man if he had to fight on foot. The lacing used to hold the metal scales in place made such armour a colourful work of art.

Once dressed for battle, his face covered with a fearsome iron mask, the samurai armed himself to the teeth with a spear, bow and arrows and two swords. One of the latter was the legendary two-handed fighting sword, the other a shorter weapon used for fighting and beheading fallen enemies, for the samurai collected heads rather as Red Indians took scalps.

Although every samurai took a tremendous pride not only in his swordsmanship but in his actual sword, he was never allowed to forget that the true warrior should be equally deadly with or without weapons, so the martial arts included unarmed combat techniques that remain unmatched even today. The most famous of these, ju-jitsu, or “the gentle art”, was a form of wrestling in which the attacker was lured into using his own strength to bring about his downfall. This was very much in accordance with the samurai delight in skill and subtlety rather than sheer strength.

Then, at a later date, came a more aggressive way of fighting known as karate, which was not Japanese at all but had originated either in China or the island of Okinawa. But the true samurai was expected to practice all the martial arts every day, and in between campaigns many of these unique warriors would travel from one end of Japan to the other seeking new teachers to improve their skill.

The decline of the samurai began in the 16th century, when Nobunaga, one of the country’s outstanding military leaders, organized his army on European lines, with disciplined formations of ordinary troops armed with spears. This dismayed the samurai, who were used to single combats between warriors of similar rank and who had absolutely no idea how to deal with a mass attack.

Some of the younger “gentlemen soldiers” promptly adapted themselves to the new ways and became generals, but the old ideals of bushido were clearly becoming out of date. Then someone bought a number of match look muskets from a party of Portuguese sailors and the fate of the samurai was sealed. Even four hundred years ago, Japanese workmen had an almost unmatched skill for copying unfamiliar designs, and within six months they were making firearms on practically mass production lines.

How would the martial arts stand up to this new development? In 1575, the Battle of Nagashino provided the answer, when a small force of 3,000 men armed with muskets faced a mass onslaught of samurai cavalry. The gorgeous, silk embroidered armour of the horsemen proved useless against a hail of lead bullets, and the old time warriors were slaughtered almost to a man. Overnight they became quaint relics of the past, fit only for ceremonial parades.

Outdated they may have been, but the idea of the knightly code of bushido was not forgotten. Nor did the Japanese lose their respect for the martial arts that the samurai had brought to such a pitch of perfection. Unemployed warriors began to show off their skills in exhibitions as a way of earning a living, and even began to teach their long cherished secrets to ordinary men who regarded them more as a fascinating sport than a way of life.

Ju-Jitsu, later to be renamed Judo, became enormously popular, as did the far more lethal karate. Even the terrible sword play was reborn as kendo, using 4 foot (1-2 metres) long bamboo poles instead of sharp blades.

As sport, the martial arts were to become more widely known after the passing of the samurai than they had ever been at the height of that warrior caste’s power, but because Japan remained closed to the outside world until Victorian times, the West knew nothing of these oriental skills. Then a tremendous and growing interest in all things Japanese began to spread overseas, and today the martial arts are followed in schools all over Europe and America. How each developed and is used today, and how they have been rivalled by an equally ancient martial art from China will be explained in the coming weeks.