Well, if it’s 27 May, that must mean… YES, THAT’S RIGHT! It’s the 104th anniversary of the last time the British Army used scaling ladders to try to storm a fortress — specifically the fortress of Spin Baldak in Afghanistan.
That’s a slightly misleading picture because (a) it’s from the siege of Badajoz in Spain in 1812, a century or so earlier (because I couldn’t find one of Spin Baldak), and (b) that event was part of Britain’s military campaign against Napoleon, which was ultimately successful…
The storming of Spin Baldak, by contrast, took place during the Third Anglo-Afghan War, which is known in Afghanistan as the War of Independence, which suggests at the very least a score draw — and the ladders didn’t exactly help.
One of the men serving on 27 May 1919 was Brigadier Ted Hughes who – according to his Telegraph obituary – royally took the piss when he later recounted the tale:
In his subsequent account of his experiences — a richly sarcastic memoir that was enjoyed more by his contemporaries than by his senior officers — Hughes wrote: “The Higher Command — acting doubtless on the excellent principle that if you can’t surprise the enemy it is better to surprise your own side than no one at all — supplied little or no information about the fort and its garrison.” It was, however, known that the fort was enclosed in a 200-yard-long, 15-foot-high outer wall and within this was an even higher wall. Hughes’s regiment was ordered to take the south side with scaling ladders.
The crack troops set off in the wee small hours.
“0300 hours saw that mighty army move forward to the storming of the fortress. Everything was to be done in deathly silence — not a whisper was to rouse the unsuspecting Afghans. Indeed, the only sounds were the crashing of ammunition boxes and entrenching tools as the mules threw their loads — and the thudding of hooves as they bolted into the night. Every few seconds the air was split by the yells of some officer urging the men to greater silence or the despairing call of some NCO who had lost his section. A sound as of corrugated iron being dropped from a great height denoted that the scaling ladders were being loaded on the carts: with these two exceptions, no one would have had an inkling that several thousand armed men were pressing forward to the fray.”
The idea was that they would use the scaling ladders to get down into the ditch around the fort, then up the other side, then up the outer walls of the fort. When they reached it, though, they discovered the ladders weren’t even long enough to get into the ditch.
It’s perhaps no surprise that our military activities in this part of the world are usually assumed to have looked something like this.
Still, the British managed to be successful, even if the scaling ladders weren’t, because the Afghan garrison commander ordered a retreat. History does not relate whether he was just terrified by the extraordinary racket the British were making outside.
