Sea Control - Sea Control 485 - Napoleonic Wars in the Adriatic with Dave Watson

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

Links:The Frontier Sea: The Napoleonic Wars in the Adriatic, by Dave Watson, Balkan Military History, 2023.Balkan Military History 

Hey folks, it's Jared. Admittedly, I could have done a better job timing this episode's release to coincide with that of the Ridley Scott epic, Napoleon. But this week we have Dave Watson here, and he's going to discuss his book, The Frontier Sea, The Napoleonic Wars, and The Adriatic. This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out simsec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion,

check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Bums. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts.

And with that, Kimber's met. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Technology. Hello, Hashem, Mason. Welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dave Watson, and we're going to discuss his book, The Frontier Sea, The Napoleonic Wars, and the Adriatic. So, Dave, welcome. Could you tell the audience a little bit more about your background, please?

Yeah. Hi, Jared. I'm a lawyer by qualification, but I moved into policy development later in my career. um in 2018 i i took semi-retirement um my wife's not convinced as much semi about it but nonetheless uh that's what i do i'm sort of a scottish think tank mostly on economic and social policy uh but some defense work recently i was giving evidence on uh for probably of interest to your listeners uh on naval shipbuilding to the scottish parliament a couple of weeks ago so there um so that was my my my daily job um my my real passion of course is history as as a child um sort of you know the usual inspirational history teacher and books and the like um my specialist

interest has always been the balkans i have no family links so people often ask me why and i've no idea uh just got into it um and i used to write journal articles and the rest but um now in semi retirement time to write some books and I've published a book on called Chasing the Soft Underbelly, Turkey in the Second World War and then this book on the wars in the Adriatic during the Napoleonic Wars. Just one quick follow-up before we move on I think we had a little internet hiccup that my editors are going to have to clean up but what was could you tell us the name of the think tank one more time please? Yeah it's called the the Reed Foundation. Got it thank you so can We start by talking a little bit about the maritime geography of the Adriatic.

I know my own experience having been down in the Balkans, going to visit Croatia, is that we wanted to go across to Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina to see the bridge. Drove across there, came back to discover there was a bit of a border dispute. So the place we had crossed was now closed. We wound up having to circle back around through like Montenegro to get back into Croatia where we were. And there's we're a little concerned for a couple of hours here as we try to navigate. And it sounds like actually the maritime geography is no less confusing than the land geography. Yep, that's certainly true. As someone who's driven over most of the Balkans, particularly Bosnia, it's pretty, pretty challenging.

A mountainous, obviously, the water has its own challenges. I suppose the the Asiatic is probably best described as an offshoot of the Mediterranean. So if you think of the Mediterranean, you think of a cul-de-sac up one coast of Italy. It's about 460 miles long and around 100 miles wide, about 37, though, at its narrowest point when you enter it in the Adriatic. The Italian coast on the west side is pretty flat and for ships very navigable, although there aren't many ports, at least substantial ports. On the Balkan side, what's usually called the Dalmatian coast, its feature is mountains and a thin strip of land and also islands, which you don't get on the Italian side. So it's rather strange maritime geography. so to to help listeners sort of picture it if you think of Venice in the in the far north is

probably the most famous city in the in the region and Trieste which is today in modern Italy but in the Napoleonic time it was Austrian also in the north and then you work your way down the coast to ports like Pula, Zadar, Split, modern-day Dubrovnik, Kotor and down to Albania, Dures and the Greek coast so those are the sort those are the sort of towns but yeah clearly islands are a key feature on that coast as well as rocks and sandbanks as you approach to the major major rivers. How is service in the Adriatic viewed by the sailors who serve there? I think the answer to that question is probably depending on who you were I mean the first thing to to understand unlike today when when when you were sailing around with gps and and all the

modern the modern techniques um in the polandic times they essentially had very inaccurate maps and even inexperienced pilots even to get you in and out of some of the harbors although there was a venetian guide which i have a copy of which is very good uh very detailed and it was translated in english in london 1806 um i haven't read it in any of the royal navy memoirs but i suspect it was an essential purchase if you were a frigate captain heading off to to the mediterranean and the the key thing you get from all the memoirs both uh british um russian and others is the one thing they remember about the adriatic is the wind uh in particular a wind called the brora which is a northwesterly wind which uh which flows down the dalmatian coast

mostly in winter but not always and it can reach hurricane speeds 220 kilometers per hour at worst i'll read you one sentence from a russian um sailor a lieutenant in the uh in the russian fleet a guy called bronowski um and he said um the wind within the apparent aspiration and an extraordinary strength burst from behind the mountains raising clouds of dust tearing out trees and peeling the roofs of houses you can imagine what that did to a sailing ship of the of in the alice in the age of sail ships were dismasted and so on and were very difficult to spot the one thing you get from the memoirs is that it just came at you from behind the mountains And you didn't have much time to respond to that.

There was also the Sirocco wind from the south, which blew a red dust, which the Russians in particular found hard going. I suppose other sailors, if you're one of the locals, you weren't very impressed by this period. Their cargoes often got seized. and the navies had a system called prize money where they gained a share of the value of the ship and the excuse me and the um and the actual payments themselves the naval personnel and they the the thing that comes to from reading all their memoirs is that they were a long way from home um and more importantly they were a long way from their commanders so you actually have very junior officers having to make not just tactical and military decisions but also diplomatic ones

as well now for a Royal Navy frigate commander that wasn't all that unusual they were used to being using their initiative in fact they were encouraged to do so but for the Russian commanders they found this rather odd and even quite junior soldiers as a memoir of a lieutenant in the 35th foot who found himself commanding garrisons making decisions about where to take his troops something would never happen on the mainland in in that period so the list of the countries involved was surprisingly long i can understand sort of the autumn ottoman austro-hungarian interest in that region both those empires sort of abutted the region where it's like overlapped the region at different periods but what were the british the french and the russian interests in the adriatic

yeah that's a very good question and and and and one which does hit you when you when you when you when you read the book um let's not forget venice as well which of course uh was was coming to the end of its of its period obviously when when napoleon captured it uh and to a lesser degree naples which remember there was no italy in this in this period there were essentially small states and the Habsburg-Ottoman conflict had raged for centuries but by this time the border was actually fairly stable what they didn't have were big navies there the Ottoman did have a big navy but not in the Adriatic and the and the Austrians didn't the Russian is the one that often surprises people because obviously people don't think of the Russians in the in the in the Mediterranean

but they'd actually had an interest there since the time of Catherine the Great but the Russians were always constrained by the by the straits by Istanbul the the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles as we as we know it better so if the Russians were typically very often at war with the Ottomans so therefore those straits were cut off from them so they didn't they had some real issues in relation to getting fleets in and out of the Mediterranean. The French were there largely because of Italy, the Revolutionary Wars, which Napoleon made his name, and they defeated the Austrians who controlled most of northern Italy,

what we would call the Italian plain, Lombardy, etc., and Venice today. But they essentially, their defeat brought about French expansion, and when they lost the war and they kept coming back for more, all the way through the Napoleonic Wars, they essentially had to give up more land on the Dalmatian coast to the French, of course, had already acquired much of the Venetian ports on that coast.

And so the French sort of expanded by accident almost, although some argue that Napoleon had an eye on a route to India through the Ottoman Empire. There is, I can see where it comes from. There are some dispatches from Napoleon, which uh in his early years which does give that impression of course he did invade egypt which uh which uh adds up but frankly it really wasn't practical in those days for the french to send

armies to india so i'm afraid i rather rubbish that theory in the book um the british um surprisingly um they stuck their noses in most of the world um the british didn't actually have the real interest uh in the adriatic until the french got there so the french were there so we had to be there um but though of course there's always a case of commerce the the british you know the british strength in the polonium wars was its economy and that was largely based on trade the problem for the british is they had no base in the adriatic no colonies there um so they were based in malta and sicily although later they had a base in the ionian isles um for those not familiar with it with the geography that's called foo and zante and cephalonia and those islands

off the coast of modern day Greece and Albania but later they built a base on the island of Lissa which you won't find the map today because it's called Viz in modern day Croatia in fact you can still see the British forts around the harbour there and they still play cricket as well which is I know it's entirely bewildering to an American audience but nonetheless it was was carried on from uh from the polionic days look if you have a few pints you can generally figure cricket out so it's just it's all a matter of like just finding the right british person to explain it to you and the appropriate beverage but what types of naval forces were being brought into the adriatic and what were those forces being used for i was i was also surprised by

like the quantity of like the russian forces that they were bringing they were sailing quite a large contingent from the black sea fleet around that's right um the austrians just had gunboats really for a bit of coastal defense and anti-piracy remember this coast was riddled historically with pirates of various types um so where everyone had to have some ships deal with that the french um relied very heavily on privateers based out the italian port of ancona and then venetian ships um which yeah the venetian fleet was not very impressive at the end but they did have a shipbuilding capacity uh which if you visit venice you can still see to this day um and later they had a frigate squadron which infamously fought the major naval battle of the

period which was the battle of lissa and the russian fleet as you rightly highlight was the was not only impressive it was the largest fleet in the asiatic by some distance um abram rushakov came in 1798 with six ships of the line and 10 frigates and he also had at that time they were allied to the Ottoman galleys but by this time they were mostly traditional modern ships of the line by a French design they brought four ships of the line as well into the Aegean attic the British weren't much impressed by the Russians Admiral Nelson of course was the British famous British commander at the time he was not impressed by the Russians and Admiral Hood described the Ottomans as the as horrid a set of allies as I ever saw in rather typical understated British

style of the period um in 1804 they typically kept three ships in line and four frigates at corfu under the command of a i'm pleased to say a scottish admiral um admiral greg um who was part of a long tradition of british sailors in 1805 1806 a huge fleet was brought into the adriatic but under admiral senyavin um the autumn again they were at peace briefly with the ottomans and he reinforced it with 15 ships of the line and they attacked Katara which is modern day Kator on the map but they failed at Ragusa which is modern day Dubrovnik however in 1806 as the problem I identified earlier hit the Russians another Russo-Turkish war broke out and Admiral Senyavin and his fleet found themselves a long way from home and had to sail back the long way

through the Straits of Gibraltar through the Bay of Biscay and you can imagine that any sailor will know this is not an easy sail today let alone with sailing ships and none of them made it back in in any any shape or form captured sunk whatever. Britain had a huge fleet in the Mediterranean 25 ships in the line but they didn't send them into the Asiatic very often essentially it was a frigate squadron their job was to disrupt supply to French garrisons and keep an eye on shipbuilding in venice um the most famous frigate captain and his story reads frankly like hornblower or any patrick o'brien novel for those of your listeners who are into napoleonic fiction and he for example he took 38 merchant ships in the first quarter of 1808 and prize money was

worth half a million pounds by today's prices so you know sadly he had a he had a rather a profligate vicar father back in Britain who spent most of it or squandered most of it on politics. So maybe there's less than the two for today. So that was Sir William Host. British also relied on privateers, but bases were vital. I've talked about those. In 18012, they did send a larger squadron, three ships of the line under Admiral Fremantle, and he one by one knocked off the French coastal bases. So you've mentioned the Ionian Islands. You've talked about sort of the french coastal bases there's actually a lot of operations and littoral spaces there with various participants engaging in amphibious assaults as part of this and how did those amphibious tactics

develop during this period yeah uh the the russians um relied pretty heavily on bombardment obviously they had big ships for example they they managed to bring 800 naval guns to bear on the fortress of corfu um uh so you know which wasn't initially successful i have to say uh if you beat a corfu you'll know it's a very big castle and very very very very big fortress but that russians had an advantage that they had montenegrin allies now montenegro in this period was on paper an ottoman ally uh but in practice um they were really independent but the montenegrins had the charming habit of chopping the heads off their their enemies so if you were a French garrison commander and you were being invited to surrender to the Russians that usually felt like

a better option than surrendering to the Montenegrins so a mixture of guns and and getting your head chopped off was reasonably successful for the Russians as a as a strategy although they did have naval infantry they called marines but they did have a naval infantry regiment attached to each fleet the british were the masters of small-scale amphibious operations in this period they used to land on the coast and cut roads to capture um french supply columns or at least force them inland to face some of the roads you described earlier which didn't exist of course in in in napoleonic times um they would also um capture uh merchant ships uh in harbors um now They didn't sail a frigate because the harbours were defended by big guns, as you'd imagine.

But they sent boats into the harbours to cut out, as in the jargon of the period. They could largely do that because in 1805, davits started to be installed on British ships, which enabled them to put boats into the water very quickly. They carried quite a lot, even smaller ships like frigates. and they used them with ships crews who were pretty good at fighting on land supported by marines every frigate had its own marine complement and these had the if you like the discipline firepower and they also had some infantry the 35th regiment foot was based in the adriatic and a lot of foreign regiments often officers by french emigre officers the other thing the british were very good at doing and it's quite astonishing if you get a chance to visit the

Adriatic they had they landed naval guns to bombard forts from the hills so as I described earlier the Adriatic is essentially on the Dalmatian coast is basically high mountains on a thin plain so if you could get guns up into the hills you could bombard towns and forts from above and he did this amazingly at places like Ragusa, Dubrovnik and at Katara in particular you know every your listeners get a chance to visit the astonishingly beautiful bay of couture as it is today you will see a fortress of the mountains above and yeah british sailors dragged um 12 and 18 pounder guns up this mountain and it's the most astonishing feat but they did this several times and that was pretty innovative for for the time so one of the more interesting inclusions in your

book uh is the first one i've seen like this actually was recommendations for war gaming this period in place uh where did you set on recommendations for naval warfare in this period and do you find a particular set of rules that allows you to capture some of the the amphibious nature of these campaigns yeah i i mean i'm a big war gamer probably for 50 odd years i've i've been i've been gaming and and the polio period in particular some of the great uh napoleonic historians like david chandler used war gaming to illustrate particularly at sandhurst and where he where he taught um so i was looking to to i had space in this book which sadly i didn't have in the in the first book about turkey um so um what i did was i had a look through

the options now uh anyone who's played naval war games will know that there can be incredibly complicated in in all periods but particularly the the age of sale and um and frankly that just puts most people off trying it however we have a it's the math uh organization that throws everyone off yes you're you're familiar with those yeah um they sell right across the world so big war but black seas um you know the purists don't like them it has to be said because they have lots of abstractions um but they are very playable uh and even you know landlubbers like me can manage not to sail their ship into into off the table or somewhere else and uh and and they have some lovely ship models at 1 700 scale which is about sort of length of your finger which is just

about the right size to play a game you can see what you're doing and they're not too difficult to build um as far as the amphibious part of it's concerned there really aren't any pure amphibious rules so what you have to do is fight the naval thing and then shift to land and use land rules and uh i recommend these are in the in the asian attic there weren't many big battles although i do describe some of the balkan russia turkish war battles which were large but in the main they're small scale battles skirmishes in some cases so rules like um uh the too fat lardy sharp practice uh ospreys rebels and patriots which was actually designed for american uh wars of the of the 19th century works very well for this for this period in the book um i one of the scenarios

in the book i used is the battle of grado in 1810 which is up to the north end of the of the adriatic that's a harbor game where the the british essentially land by boat um and capture the town cut out some warships and and and sail away and for a number of war game shows in the uk i built to essentially build a harbor model to to game this and people play this as a participation game you can see pictures of it on my on my website well unfortunately that's all that we have time for today i'd like to thank my guest dave watson dave where can we find you online and what are you working on next sure um uh on twitter i think x we're supposed to call it now um i'm at at balkan underscore dave uh or at dave watson's 1683 obviously the date of the siege of vienna

as any balkan nut will know on threads um my website has all the big content that's balkanhistory.org and my blog that's balkan dave a blog spot um has a page on the adriatic so if you want to read more there's stuff and various other pictures etc and i have a balkan military history has a facebook page where again uh quite a lot of material is on there just uh just search for it um in terms of next work i'm just finalized literally last night till very late um finalizing the proofs of my next book um which is i'm co-written with a with a with a greek author and it's the first of a three volume history of the cyprus conflict 1963 to 1974 and volume one And the covers, if you go to my Twitter feed, you'll see a very nice artistic cover.

Sadly, the first one was mostly airplanes, not a lot of ships. But as we get to 74, the navies do play a role, particularly the Turkish Navy. Volume one is out shortly, published by Helium Books. Yeah, that was a very early sea control episode when we restarted the podcast as we covered Operation. Was it called Operation Attila? I would have to go back and look. I forget what sea control number it was here, but, yeah, I would invite the listeners to go back through the archive, find that one. We will have links to the frontier sea, Napoleonic Wars, and the Adriatic embedded in the show notes, as well as your website, Bulk and Military History. But thank you again for joining us, Dave, and to the listeners, thank you for tuning in.

We'll see you next time. Thank you. © BF-WATCH TV 2021