July, 2014 Military History Magazine, pages 64-70
“Some days you the bug, some days you the windshield.”
-Private Johnson Beharry, British Army, Victoria Cross recipient, 2004
It is no accident that military history is studied mostly by hobbyists as feminized post WWII academia’s collective head remains firmly buried in the sands of time. Fortunately there are enough of us amateurs interested in the subject to keep a couple pros busy with the kinetic side of history. Military History Magazine, Military History Quarterly, and the publishers of table top war games cover much of the lesser known conflicts of the human past.
When I was taught about the crusades as a youth—in school and through numerous books—that series of bloody wars was taught as a conflict of religions or simply a great ill-conceived series of Christian adventures. In his article on the fall of the last Crusader States Richard Tada strikes much closer to the truth, exposing the rulers of the Crusader States as the worst example of contemporary Western politicians: greedy, short-sighted, quick to war and more than willing to make shady deals with the native Islamic states they were supposedly at odds with.
Mister Tada uses the latest period translations to expose a corrupt collection of ‘Christian’ gangster states at war with each other and fielding ‘ferocious’ yet ‘pathetically small’ military forces, not to defend the conquests of their ancestors or the values of their faith, but to shore up their tax base and maintain political power over their fellow Christians. Of particular interest is the very ‘military contractor’ like behavior of the military orders of the Temple and the Hospital. Any war gamer who looks into this subject will clearly come to the conclusion that Mister Tada did, that these fools deserved to lose.
There are some definite lessons in 13th Century Middle Eastern military history that might have, if headed, saved the modern West from at least the loss of an ambassador for instance…
