Charles Edward Callwell

Sir Charles Edward Callwell (born April 2, 1859 London , † May 1928 ibid) was a British professional officer.

According to Douglas Porch, he is considered the " Clausewitz of colonial warfare". His work, published in 1896: Small Wars. Their Principles & Practice was the first systematic military-historical study of the European colonial wars of the second half of the 19th century. The analysis, which was practically forgotten after the First World War, gained renewed interest in the 1990s, as Anglo-American military historians especially recognized parallels to the so-called New Wars, which are usually characterized as asymmetrical warfare .

Military career

Callwell joined the Royal Artillery in 1878 and served in Afghanistan ( Second Anglo-Afghan War ) from 1878 to 1881 and in South Africa from 1880 to 1881 ( First Boer War ). In 1885 he attended Staff College Camberley and was assigned to the War Office intelligence branch from 1887 to 1892 because of his excellent language skills as an intelligence officer. During the Second Boer War from 1899 to 1902 he commanded a mobile or flying column against Boer commands. After the war he returned to the War Office and was passed as colonel in 1909 .

At the outbreak of World War I , Callwell was recalled to the service as a temporary major general and served under Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener , in the War Office as director of military operations. In January 1916 Callwell was replaced from this post; apparently because he was partially responsible for the disaster of the Dardanelles campaign against the Ottoman Empire . He then stayed temporarily in Russia , where he worked as part of a military mission. At the end of the war he worked in the munitions ministry. In recognition of his achievements, he was knighted as Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1917 .

Writing activity

Callwell had already begun writing in the 1880s. His essay: Lessons to Be Learned from the Campaigns in Which British Forces Have Been Employed Since the Year 1865 won the Royal United Service Institution award in 1887 . This essay became the basis for Small Wars in 1896. Callwell divided the potential indigenous opponents of the British Empire overseas into six categories:

1. European trained natives like the Sikhs in India in the 1840s,
2. Semi-organized troops like the Afghan army,
3. Disciplined but "primitive" native armies like that of the Zulus in South Africa,
4. "Fanatic" tribal warriors like the dervishes in Sudan ,
5. "Real" guerrillas like the Maoris in New Zealand and the so-called dacoits in Burma ,
6. The Boers, which he assigned a category of their own because of their European origins and their mounted guerrillas.

Callwell recognized because of the comparative studies of other colonial powers up to the USA that the main problems of warfare overseas were less the military opponent than the geographic and climatic conditions. Above all, he warned against getting involved in a guerrilla war, as this would inevitably lead to a confrontation with the civilian population. Callwell also warned against the misconception of the technical superiority of the European armed forces. Based on his investigations, he came to the conclusion that ultimately better discipline and tactics and a superior morale would have decided the outcome of various colonial wars.

Callwell's work, which appeared in its third edition in 1906 and already contained the experiences of the Second Boer War, was practically forgotten after the First World War, as the number of colonial wars was drastically reduced and the Empire preferred the method of air policing , i.e. H. the massive use of air forces against insurgents if necessary. Charles W. Thayer , who studied the recent history of the guerrilla war intensively in 1962/63, was apparently unknown to Callwell. In contrast to this, the German military historian Werner Hahlweg considered that even 1968 was an important military theorist and Small Wars was a standard work on the theory of guerrilla warfare:

This work was based on the rich, worldwide colonial experience of the English. Comprehensive, almost encyclopedically laid out, it can rightly be addressed as one of the fundamental books on the manifestations, possibilities and leadership practices of the modern guerrillas: as the instructive and concrete result of many varied encounters between whites and the world of color in this area.

A brief analysis of Small Wars written by Douglas Porch can be found in his preface to the 1996 edition.

literature

Wikisource: Author: Charles Edward Callwell  - Sources and full texts (English)

• Keyword: Callwell, Maj. Gen. Sir Charles Edward (1859-1928) , in: Ian FW Beckett: Encyclopedia of Guerilla Warfare , New York 2001, p. 34f.
• Colonel CE Callwell: Small Wars. Their Principles & Practice . Third edition. Introduction by the Bison Books Edition by Douglas Porch, Lincoln / London 1996 (reprint of the 3rd edition from 1906).
• Keyword: Callwell, Maj Gen Sir Charles Edward , in: Richard Holmes (ed.): The Oxford Companion to Military History , New York 2001, p. 167f.
• Werner Hahlweg: Guerrilla. War without fronts , Stuttgart a. a. 1968, p. 75f.
• Daniel Whittingham: Charles E. Callwell and the British way in warfare , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2020 (Cambridge Military Histories), ISBN 978-1-108-48007-9 .

See also

• guerrilla
• Little war
• Klaas van der Maaten