HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-10-23T08:07:05.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/period/general-history/feed/atom HistoryExtra <![CDATA[History crossword: 16 October]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/history-crossword-16-october/ 2026-10-23T08:07:05.000Z 2026-10-23T07:31:30.000Z View Riddle on the source website]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[The History Round: our weekly trivia challenge]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/general-history/weekly-history-quiz/ 2026-10-23T07:31:14.000Z 2026-10-23T07:31:14.000Z Test your knowledge with our general knowledge weekly history quiz...
View Riddle on the source website
Did you know we have other regular quizzes here at HistoryExtra? To test your historical knowledge even further, try our daily quizzes, or our weekly crossword.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Can you solve our history crossword of the week?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/general-history/crossword/ 2026-10-23T07:30:10.000Z 2026-10-23T07:30:10.000Z View Riddle on the source website]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Daily Quiz: 23 October]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/daily-history-trivia-quiz/ 2026-10-23T06:00:10.000Z 2026-10-23T06:00:10.000Z View Riddle on the source website
If you want to test your historical knowledge further, why not try our weekly crossword too?
]]> Jonny Wilkes <![CDATA[Malaria once ravaged Britain. Could it come back?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/general-history/malaria-once-ravaged-britain-could-it-come-back/ 2026-10-22T14:01:03.000Z 2026-10-22T14:00:22.000Z According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), there were 263 million cases of malaria and 597,000 deaths around the world in 2023. The life-threatening disease, spread by infected mosquito bites, is most associated with sub-Saharan Africa, but it used to be a scourge in the UK.
From the 15th to 19th centuries, the marshland areas of southeast England, the Fens and up the Yorkshire coast were ravaged by malaria, although under names like ‘marsh fever’ and ‘ague’. Spread by the Anopheles mosquito, it came with high levels of mortality. Parishes in marshland areas in the 1600s and 1700s recorded deaths rates from ague at between 60 and 80 per 1,000 people, or two or three times as much as non-marshland parishes.
This was also a time when people believed in the miasma theory, which claimed that diseases spread through foul-smelling air. So, even though it is extremely rare for malaria to be passed from person to person, there was a fear that once someone came down with ague, the whole community could be in danger.
How widespread was malaria and what were the cures?
Ague was so prevalent that it merited mentions in literature throughout the centuries, from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. William Shakespeare referred to the disease in a number of his plays, including Julius Caesar, Macbeth and The Tempest. In King Lear, he even coined the term, “ague-proof”.
Not only the poor living on marshland perished, either, since malaria could be found along the length of the River Thames, bringing it to the capital of London. James VI and I contracted the disease as his health finally failed in 1625, and Oliver Cromwell succumbed to malaria in 1658.
Common remedies included opium and alcohol, although they didn’t prove to be overly effective. The treatment of malaria truly improved with the introduction of quinine, found in the bark of the cinchona trees of South America. It was called Jesuit’s Bark, as it had been brought to Europe by Jesuit missionaries.
This association with Catholics, however, meant that physicians in Protestant England were initially reluctant to administer the medicine. After its first use in England, attributed to Robert Brady in 1660, quinine grew in popularity after being used to treat Charles II.
Why did malaria die out in the UK?
Malaria gradually died out in England, helped by better healthcare, sanitation and housing, along with the drainage of marshlands. Larger livestock populations may have also distracted mosquitoes from biting humans, too.
The disease remained a threat until the 20th century, though. The last outbreak in the UK occurred in the years after the First World War, when British soldiers serving in the Balkans, where malaria was endemic, fell ill in huge numbers. When they were brought back to the UK for recuperation, especially to areas with lots of mosquitoes, such as the Isle of Sheppey in Kent, the infection spread quickly.
It is thought that there were nearly 500 cases between 1917 and 1921, although this paled in comparison to the Spanish Flu that wreaked havoc in Europe at the same time.
Could malaria return?
The last indigenous case of malaria in the UK came in the 1950s, and by 1975 WHO declared the eradication of the disease in Europe.
While highly unlikely to be endemic once more, scientists have suggested that climate change and the volume of traffic with areas where malaria remains a serious risk could bring new types of mosquitoes to the UK.
]]> Kev Lochun <![CDATA[“I wouldn’t recommend anyone attempt Everest”: Tenzing director Jennifer Peedom on Everest queues, reclaiming lost narratives and dropping Loki into a crevasse]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/tenzing-movie-everest-jennifer-peeden-interview/ 2026-10-17T15:47:56.000Z 2026-10-16T23:01:09.000Z Tenzing Norgay was half of the duo who made it to ‘the roof of the world’ when he completed a historic first ascent of Mount Everest alongside Edmund Hillary in 1953 – and by all accounts when they stepped onto the summit, they did so together. But when the accolades were handed out, you might think he was the lesser party.
New Zealander Hillary received a knighthood; so too did the expedition’s leader, British Army officer John Hunt. But Tenzing, a man who not only made it to the summit but was the expedition’s sirdar (head sherpa) – responsible for all the logistics on the mountain that made the ascent possible – was only offered the George Medal, a civilian honour conceived to mark acts of heroism during the Blitz.
- Read more | Tenzing Norgay: the Sherpa mountaineer who first conquered Everest
The popular narrative that followed in the ensuing decades was that Hillary had summited Everest (referred to increasingly by one of its original names, Chomolungma) and that Tenzing was there. It’s one of the many misconceptions surrounding the man that director Jennifer Peedom seems to hope to dispel in her first dramatic feature Tenzing.
Peedom is no stranger to the Himalayas, having started as a camera operator on Himalayan expeditions before making films of her own – fans of mountain movies may well remember her 2015 film Sherpa, which documented the real stories from the Sherpa community in the aftermath of a 2014 avalanche on the Khumbu Icefall that caused a number of fatalities. Just as Sherpa was, Tenzing is thoughtful and reflective, aiming to foreground Norgay in his own story for the first time.
Tom Hiddleston and Willem Dafoe are the biggest names in the cast, taking on the roles of Hillary and Hunt, but its star is undoubtedly Genden Phuntsok – a Chinese actor of Tibetan descent – as Norgay.
His casting reflects another lesser-known fact – the most famous sherpa in the world was not an ethnic Sherpa, but the son of a Tibetan yak herder who came to Nepal and later moved to Darjeeling seeking work among the expeditions. ‘Tenzing Norgay’ wasn’t even the name he was born with; that was the one given to him later.
Peedom’s Tenzing is the story of how a young boy looked up at the mountain revered as Chomolungma – the mother goddess – and dreamed of what it would mean to stand on what is quite literally hallowed ground.
We caught up with the director for an exclusive interview after the film’s London premiere to find out more.
The 1953 ascent of Everest is such a well-known narrative, but often one dominated by the idea of heroic European conquest, and I wondered what you want to reveal about this story by focusing it through Tenzing’s perspective?
Jennifer Peedom: I spent a lot of my early career working as a camera operator and a documentary filmmaker in the Himalayas, and for me what was always interesting and part of the attraction of the place was the culture and the Sherpa people.
One of my earliest films about the Sherpas [Sherpa, 2015] was because I was really interested in this idea that mountaineering for them is a job, but Chomolungma is a deity that they worship, and that the landscape means something spiritual and very different to what it means to western climbers who come and climb the mountain. I wanted audiences to see that point of view.
I’ve heard you say of Sherpa that you “weren’t making a climbing film, you were making a story about a people”. Tenzing feels like it’s doing a bit of both?
JP: The reason I wanted to make this film about Tenzing was first to redress that historical balance, because he’d never really been at the centre. He was more of a supporting character in the story.
But it was also [about] everything that Tenzing had been through in his life just to get to the starting line of Everest, let alone ascend the mountain. That story to me was fascinating – the sheer number of obstacles he had to overcome just to get to that place.
He’d been through so much in his life. He’d been exiled from Tibet to Nepal as a young boy. His family had had to leave [him] while they were looking for work just to survive. He was an outsider in that community – the classic underdog in many ways. He was underestimated his entire life.
It was about that as much as anything else, about showing the family the cultural sacrifices that he had to make along the way to fulfil this childhood dream.
I was really taken with the character that Caitríona Balfe plays, Jill Henderson. She is such a big part of the British mountaineering story overall in Nepal, but also a big part of Tenzing’s story as well.
JP: It was really she that convinced him to take on the [British 1953] expedition. He genuinely had hesitations. He had an extreme loyalty to the Swiss, who he’d climbed with the year before, and they had tried and failed. He was depleted. He was exhausted. He’d promised his family he wasn’t going to go back again, and then this invitation came.
It was Henderson and Raymond Lambert [the Swiss mountaineer with whom Tenzing had climbed to within 237 metres of the summit in 1952] who colluded to convince Tenzing to go, because they knew that this was probably going to be the one. They knew that this was his moment and that he deserved it more than anyone else.
Lambert wrote him a letter. Henderson campaigned to him endlessly until he eventually agreed to go. And I just felt like, what an amazing woman, who had such a remarkable part in history that had also never been talked about in the traditional narratives of the telling of Everest, yet she played such a significant role.
There’s an ongoing conversation right now as to the state of climbing on Mount Everest, and we’ve all seen these mind-boggling photos of the queues. What are your thoughts on the responsibilities we have as storytellers when we’re discussing a mountain that represents a peak of human endeavour, but also is a place of spirituality?
JP: For whatever reason, Everest has become this symbol of human achievement, and it’s become a bucket list ambition. It attracts people, and no matter what happens on Everest, the worse the disasters, the more people seem to come the next year to test themselves. And I think that says something about western culture in some ways, and I find it interesting, though I don’t really understand it myself.
- Read more | Race to the top of the world: the story of the 1953 conquest of Everest
It’s like a proving ground. And I would suggest that there are other ways to do that than to come to Everest and add to the traffic jam that is that mountain these days. I would not recommend anyone attempt to go there and climb, really, because it is dangerous due to the crowds. There are better ways to achieve a dream than standing in a line to put your foot on the summit of the highest mountain in the world.
That difficulty of climbing a mountain like Everest was really evident in Tenzing: the laboured breathing and heavy steps were so evocative. How important was it to give a sense that this isn’t a walk in the park?
JP: Really important, and it’s a very difficult thing to portray in cinema because it’s a feeling. Someone described it to me once as running on a treadmill and breathing through a straw. You just can’t get enough oxygen into your lungs, and so your legs are burning. You’re sort of taking a step and then having about three breaths and then finding the strength to take another step.
It’s enormously challenging and the higher you get, the worse that gets. Trying to portray that is difficult, but I’m glad you picked up on the breath. We spent a lot of time with sound design working with breath because that’s the thing keeping you alive.
On the spirituality point, there was one scene I wanted to ask you about: at one of the high camps there’s a mutiny among the Sherpas that Tenzing resolves, and it concludes with a blessing using rice. I wonder if you can tell us what we’re seeing there, and more broadly how you brought the authenticity of Sherpa culture into the movie?
JP: That really came from my own experiences with Sherpas on mountains and hearing their stories. That scene where they say [of Chomolungma] that they’re too frightened to go further because now that we’re up at the South Col, we’re literally stabbing our spikes into her shoulders? They were conversations that I’d heard in camps on Everest.
- Watch now | How did Mount Everest get its name?
And one of the Sherpas in that scene – his name is Balu – was actually our expedition doctor who played that role. He also said, “Jen, these are conversations I had with Sherpas like one year ago on Everest”. So it was about bringing all of those experiences that I’d had in conversations with Sherpas over many years about what the mountain means to them, and trying to help a broader audience understand that, to them, it is a living embodiment of a deity, of a goddess.
For them, there is a quite literal feeling that the landscape is inseparable from the spirituality within it. It was really important to me to portray that perspective because the film is really from Tenzing’s point of view. I know he had a conversation like that with the Sherpas on that Everest expedition.
He had the challenge of not only climbing the mountain himself, but he was leading the Sherpa team and was responsible for getting all of the supplies. So he had this kind of double job that he had to do, and he was under enormous pressure. And he was juggling the demands of two very different competing groups. And the Sherpas did fear the unknown. Tenzing was unique in the sense that he wanted to climb, but he also chose to see the goddess not as something to be feared, but to be revered, and he was unusual in that, and he was a pioneer in that way.
There is another way to see this. We don’t need to fear her. If we ask for her permission, ask for her blessing, she will grant us passage, she will keep us safe. And that’s what that scene is about. They’re throwing rice, which is an offering to Chomolungma. And I think as you see in the film, it gave the Sherpas a sense of peace that it was okay, and of course it was. There were no accidents on that expedition. There were no deaths. It was remarkable.
It’s a very beautiful scene. I know you know Sherpa culture well from your previous works, including your 2015 documentary Sherpa. How much did your documentarian background inform how you approached Tenzing?
JP: You probably can tell from the film that we were shooting on real mountains in real landscapes. And I guess for me, that was what I knew. It seemed insane to do it any other way because part of the story is the landscape, and so to fake that didn’t make any sense to me.
I wanted the audience, but also the actors, to experience those landscapes and those cultures, and I wanted to show that when you shoot in those communities, you’re shooting with people who live in those communities, and that brings this beautiful level of authenticity.
And then the actors themselves cannot help but be affected by that. You know, many of them have talked about the fact that they didn’t really need to do a lot of acting in these scenes because when Tom Hiddleston is down that crevasse climbing out of it, he’s really down a crevasse climbing out of it. It was like, “Okay, Tom, start climbing.” He’s really doing it. That was the point.
- Read more | “Just like us and not at all”: what Tom Hiddleston wants us to remember about Pompeii
I wanted to ask you about that specific moment, where Tom falls into that crevasse. How does that actually happen?
JP: It was a trapdoor that we had set up, so when he landed in that spot, the trapdoor got pulled and he had the safety rope. When he’s hanging in the crevasse, that is just the main safety rope – so the picture rope became the safety rope, and we did a lot of work to make sure that we could make the ropes look period appropriate, but they’re also proper safety ropes. That’s how we did it. He just did it for real.
But you built a trapdoor on a Nepalese mountain?
JP: That’s in New Zealand. All of the technical climbing with the actors from Everest Base Camp up was in New Zealand [Ed’s note: everything below Base Camp was filmed in Nepal]. And those mountains really are as big from bottom to top as the Himalayas. They just start at almost sea level in the Southern Alps.
All of the actual aerials of Everest itself, [they’re] the real mountain, the real [Khumbu] icefall. But then we would shoot the specific scenes, in real crevasses and icefalls and ridges and faces in New Zealand. And the summit of Everest, we shot on the summit of one of the highest mountains in New Zealand. And you can see the awe and the emotion on the actors’ faces, because they’re standing on one of the highest mountains in New Zealand looking down at the world below them.
Tenzing is streaming on Apple TV from 16 October and is being shown in select cinemas now
]]> Lauren Good <![CDATA[From plague 'searchers' to strawberry birthmarks: a history of women's bodies]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/from-plague-searchers-to-strawberry-birthmarks-a-history-of-womens-bodies/ 2026-10-16T16:00:07.000Z 2026-10-16T16:00:07.000Z What was 'nidgeting'? How did women know they were pregnant before modern tests? And what did people in the past believe a mother’s imagination could do to her unborn child?
In this episode, Lauren Good speaks to historian Erin Maglaque about her book Presence, which explores the history of the female body – and society's longstanding beliefs about it.
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[George Washington's dirty tricks: how the American hero fooled Britain at Yorktown]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/george-washingtons-dirty-tricks-how-the-american-hero-fooled-britain-at-yorktown/ 2026-10-16T14:31:04.000Z 2026-10-16T14:30:41.000Z 1. Dangerous assumptions
Hannibal lured Roman troops into the perfect trap at Lake Trasimene in 217 BC
On the morning of 21 June 217 BC, during the Second Punic War (218–201 BC), the Roman army of consul Gaius Flaminius marched along the northern shore of Lake Trasimene in central Italy. They were approaching what appeared to be the encampment of a retreating Carthaginian force under Hannibal Barca, then about 30 years old and already Rome’s most dangerous enemy. The Romans believed that they were about to force a decisive battle. In reality, they were walking into one of the greatest ambushes in military history.
The crisis had begun the previous autumn when Hannibal had achieved the seemingly impossible, crossing the Alps with his multinational army and war elephants, then defeating Roman forces at the battle of Trebia in December 218 BC. Determined to restore Roman prestige, Flaminius pursued the Carthaginian forces south through Italy.
As Livy (Titus Livius) observed in his seminal History of Rome, written two centuries later, Flaminius “had more regard for victory than for either prudence or the gods”. Rather than avoid battle, he encouraged pursuit, burning farms, destroying crops and leaving a conspicuous trail of devastation. Hannibal understood exactly the kind of opponent he was facing: ambitious, aggressive and desperate for victory.
So, in selecting the location for his inevitable clash with the Romans, the Carthaginian general “chose the ground with great skill”, as the Greek scholar Polybius remarked in his Histories the following century. A narrow road ran between the lake and wooded hills to the north. During the night, 40,000–50,000 of Hannibal’s men concealed themselves in the high ground while a smaller but visible force blocked the route ahead. When the Roman column, numbering perhaps 25,000–30,000 soldiers, marched on the Carthaginian camp shortly after dawn, the trap was sprung.
Carthaginian infantry, Numidian cavalry, Iberian warriors and Gallic tribesmen attacked simultaneously from the front, flanks and rear: “The enemy appeared on all sides at once,” as Livy described the assault. Units became isolated before many Romans even realised that the battle had begun. Ancient sources suggest that as many as 15,000 Romans were killed – including Flaminius himself – with thousands more captured. The battle lasted only a few hours.
Hannibal’s victory at Trasimene was particularly remarkable in that the battle was effectively won before the first spear was thrown or sword swung. By manipulating Roman expectations and turning terrain into a weapon, he persuaded his enemy to make a fatal assumption about how the clash would unfold. Few commanders in history have demonstrated more clearly that the most decisive battlefield can be the opponent’s mind.
- Read more | Have archaeologists just found proof of ancient Carthage's legendary anti-Roman war weapon?
2. Incendiary ideas
Using diplomacy, deception and a fiery secret weapon, Byzantine forces broke the siege of Constantinople in AD 717–18
In August 717, one of the most ambitious military operations of the early medieval world was launched. The Umayyad Caliphate, the powerful Islamic realm stretching from Spain to central Asia, sent a vast expedition to capture Constantinople (now Istanbul), capital of the Byzantine empire.
Leading the assault was Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik, one of the Arab world’s most experienced commanders. Many contemporary sources suggest that his army numbered well over 100,000 men, supported by a fleet of perhaps 1,800 ships, though the exact figures remain disputed. The prize was immense. Constantinople commanded the Bosporus, controlled key trade routes between Europe and Asia, and was the political and spiritual heart of the Christian east.
The city’s prospects appeared bleak. Years of political instability had weakened the Byzantine empire, and its new ruler, Leo III the Isaurian, had seized the throne only months earlier. But Leo recognised that straightforward military resistance would not be enough. Instead, he directed Byzantine diplomats to quietly exploit divisions among the besiegers and their allies, while his intelligence networks monitored Arab movements and the defenders concealed their true resilience. As one account notes, Leo had already demonstrated his talent for deception: before becoming emperor, he had encouraged Arab hopes of his cooperation in taking the Byzantine capital – before turning the tables and seizing the throne for himself.
As well as a flair for subterfuge, the Byzantines possessed one of history’s most closely guarded military secrets: the mysterious incendiary compound known as ‘Greek fire’, its precise composition still unknown today. Propelled from tubes mounted on warships, it continued burning even on water. Arab sailors expected a conventional naval battle, followed by a blockade to effect a debilitating siege of Constantinople. Instead, they found their ships engulfed by flames. The physical damage was severe, but the psychological effect was arguably greater.
As autumn turned to winter, the siege became a contest of endurance. The attackers expected Constantinople to weaken; instead, supply problems, disease and an exceptionally harsh winter devastated their own troops. Reinforcements and provisions failed to arrive in sufficient numbers, while Byzantine diplomacy persuaded the Bulgars, led by Khan Tervel, to attack Arab forces operating around the city.
After a year of fighting, the siege collapsed in August 718. Thousands of besiegers had perished, much of the Umayyad fleet had been destroyed, and Maslama’s surviving forces withdrew. Constantinople had survived.
The victory preserved the Byzantine empire for another seven centuries, and halted the caliphate’s expansion into south-eastern Europe. It also showed that deception, intelligence and psychological warfare could be as decisive as powerful armies. In persuading a stronger enemy to misunderstand both the city’s strength and its secret weapons, Leo III won one of history’s most consequential defensive victories.
3. Power of misdirection
George Washington tricked enemy leaders into looking the wrong way to overpower the British stronghold of Yorktown in 1781
By 1781, the American War of Independence had been raging for more than six years. Britain still possessed the world’s most powerful navy, controlled major coastal cities and maintained roughly 30,000 troops in North America. Many British politicians believed that the rebellion could still be crushed. Yet within a matter of months, a carefully orchestrated deception forced the surrender of an entire British field army – and effectively decided the war.
The key figures involved were General George Washington, commander of the Continental Army, and his French ally, Lieutenant General Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau. During the summer of 1781, both men remained near New York City facing General Sir Henry Clinton, Britain’s commander-in-chief in North America.
Everything appeared to suggest that New York would be the target of the next major Allied offensive. Troops were moved, supplies accumulated, and intelligence leaks reinforced the impression. It was a bluff. As Washington reportedly explained: “If we do not deceive our own men, we will never deceive the enemy.”
Clinton saw what Washington wanted him to see. In reality, the Allied commanders were secretly preparing an assault elsewhere. Their true objective was to defeat Lieutenant General Lord Charles Cornwallis, who had established a force of approximately 8,000–9,000 British and German troops at Yorktown, Virginia. Standing on the York river that flows into Chesapeake Bay, Yorktown appeared secure so long as the Royal Navy retained control of the coast. The entire Allied plan depended upon preventing the British high command from recognising the danger until it was too late.
In August, while British attention remained fixed on New York, Washington and Rochambeau began moving more than 4,000 American and a similar number of French troops south. Simultaneously, a powerful French fleet under Admiral François Joseph Paul de Grasse sailed for the Chesapeake. On 5 September, de Grasse defeated a British relief fleet at the battle of the Chesapeake, closing Cornwallis’s escape route and trapping his forces.
By the end of September, some 17,000 Franco-American troops had surrounded Yorktown. After a three-week siege, Cornwallis surrendered on 19 October 1781, handing over more than 7,000 soldiers – one of the largest British capitulations of the 18th century. The following day, he wrote to Clinton: “I have the mortification to inform your Excellency that I have been forced to give up the posts of York and Gloucester, and to surrender the troops under my command.”
Yorktown was not simply a military victory – it was a triumph of deception. Through carefully managed intelligence, strategic misdirection and close Franco-American coordination, Washington persuaded the British command to focus on the wrong battlefield at the decisive moment. Britain continued fighting until the Treaty of Paris in 1783 but, after Yorktown, the political will to continue the war effectively collapsed.
4. Element of surprise
By overturning the expectations of an offensive, the German Kaiserschlacht was able to shatter Allied lines on the Somme in 1918 – for a time, at least
In early 1918, Germany spied a narrow window of opportunity to win the First World War. The collapse of imperial Russia and the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918 allowed Germany to transfer some 50 divisions from the eastern front to the west. For the first time in years, the German high command believed that it could achieve local superiority. Yet General Erich Ludendorff and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg knew that the advantage would be short-lived.
Since declaring war on Germany on 6 April 1917, the US had been steadily building its presence in France, with around 10,000 American troops arriving daily by the spring of 1918. Germany needed a decisive victory before Allied manpower became overwhelming. As Ludendorff put it: “We should strike at the earliest moment… before the Americans can throw strong forces into the scale. We must beat the British.”
The German strategy intended to achieve this was the Kaiserschlacht (Kaiser’s Battle), a series of offensives designed to break the stalemate on the western front. The opening blow, Operation Michael, was launched against the British Fifth Army along the Somme at 4.40am on 21 March 1918. Success depended on achieving something almost unheard of after years of trench warfare: complete tactical surprise.
Since 1914, major offensives had generally been preceded by days of artillery bombardment that advertised an attack long before it began. Ludendorff sought to overturn those expectations. Troops were secretly concentrated behind the front, wireless communications were restricted and dummy positions were used to conceal preparations. Most importantly, more than 6,600 German guns unleashed a sudden bombardment designed to paralyse enemy headquarters, artillery batteries and communications rather than simply destroy trenches. Behind the shellfire surged elite Sturmtruppen units trained to infiltrate weak points, bypass strongholds and penetrate deep into the Allied rear.
The effect was dramatic. Cloaked by dense morning fog, German forces smashed through British positions and advanced farther than any army had on the western front since 1914. In places, they pushed nearly 40 miles west, capturing tens of thousands of prisoners and threatening the vital rail hub of Amiens. Allied commanders were shocked by the speed and scale of the assault.
Yet surprise alone could not deliver victory. German infantry outpaced their supply lines, communications broke down and elite stormtrooper formations suffered heavy casualties. Though the offensive gained significant territory, it failed to destroy the British Army, seize the Channel ports or divide the Allied coalition. By July 1918, Germany’s final reserves had largely been expended, leaving Ludendorff unable to resist the Allied counter-offensives that followed.
The Kaiserschlacht ultimately failed, but it marked a turning point in military deception. Surprise was no longer a battlefield trick employed by a gifted commander. It had become an industrialised system involving intelligence, communications, logistics, artillery science and carefully coordinated operational planning. The offensive did not win the war, but it showed how modern armies could manipulate an enemy’s expectations on a vast scale.
5. Making the impossible possible
Heavy artillery couldn’t be installed and fired in the jungle-clad hills above Dien Bien Phu – or so the French believed in 1954
After almost seven years of war against the communist-led Viet Minh rebels in what’s now Vietnam, France was struggling to maintain its colonial grip on Indochina. Seeking a decisive battle, French general Henri Navarre, appointed commander-in-chief in May 1953, approved the occupation of Dien Bien Phu, a remote valley in north-west Vietnam near the Laotian border.
The plan, launched under Operation Castor in November 1953, seemed straightforward: establish a heavily fortified base supplied by air, then lure the Viet Minh into a conventional battle where French artillery, armour and air power could destroy them.
At first, things went as planned. The French garrison commanded by Colonel Christian de Castries eventually numbered around 16,000 troops including French regulars, Foreign Legionnaires, Moroccan and Algerian units, and Vietnamese auxiliaries. The base was divided into strongpoints with female codenames including Beatrice, Gabrielle, Anne-Marie, Dominique and Isabelle. The French were confident they had chosen the battlefield well.
Yet General Võ Nguyên Giáp, commander of the Viet Minh, had already begun turning that assumption into a fatal weakness. His deception involved reinforcing French beliefs about what was and wasn’t possible in this terrain. For example, French military planners thought that heavy artillery couldn’t be sited in the steep, jungle-covered hills surrounding the valley.
During late 1953 and early 1954, though, an estimated 50,000–70,000 labourers and porters helped move Viet Minh artillery, ammunition and supplies through mountains and dense jungle. Many loads were transported by bicycle, handcart or sheer muscle. Guns were dismantled, hauled uphill and concealed in reinforced caves and camouflaged positions overlooking the valley.
The French knew that the Viet Minh possessed artillery. What they failed to grasp was where Giáp intended to put it. “No Viet cannon will be able to fire three rounds before being destroyed by my artillery,” declared Colonel Charles Piroth confidently before the battle.
That illusion was shattered on 13 March 1954, when Viet Minh artillery suddenly opened fire. Within hours, outpost Beatrice had been overrun. French airfields quickly became unusable, while anti-aircraft guns made aerial resupply increasingly hazardous. The fortress designed to dominate the valley found itself trapped inside it. As the siege continued, Giáp employed trench systems that crept ever closer to French positions, echoing the tactics of the First World War.
After 56 days of fighting, on 7 May 1954 the French garrison collapsed. More than 10,000 French troops were captured, and total casualties on both sides exceeded 30,000. The defeat shocked France, accelerated negotiations at the Geneva Conference, and led to the partition of Vietnam at the 17th Parallel later that year.
Giáp did not persuade French military planners through any single deception. Instead, he exploited their conviction that the jungle-covered hills around Dien Bien Phu were impassable to heavy artillery. Then he hauled dismantled guns into camouflaged hillside positions and launched an attack that proved utterly decisive.
Iain MacGregor is a historian and author. His latest book is Battle: The Moments That Transformed Warfare from Ancient Greece to Ukraine (October, 2026)
This article was first published in the November 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[History crossword: 9 October]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/history-crossword-9-october/ 2026-10-16T07:31:04.000Z 2026-10-16T07:30:53.000Z View Riddle on the source website]]> Matt Elton <![CDATA[The stolen Native Americans who shaped US history]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-stolen-native-americans-who-shaped-us-history/ 2026-10-15T08:08:58.000Z 2026-10-12T15:42:05.000Z Between 1492 and 1880, as many as 600,000 Native Americans were enslaved in the area that would become the United States. That’s the figure estimated by historian Linford D Fisher in his book Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in US History – one of the books shortlisted for the 2026 Cundill History Prize. In today’s episode, he speaks to Matt Elton about the extent of this slavery, the impact that it had on tribal communities, and its legacy today.
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