Besieged: Seven Cities Under Siege PDF
Preview Besieged: Seven Cities Under Siege
OCT 7'66 MADRID, 1936-1939 LONDON, 1940-1941 SINGAPORE, 1941-1942 STALINGRAD, 1942-1943 WARSAW. 1939, 1943, 1944 SEVEN CITIES UNDER SIEGE JERUSALEM, 1947-1949 BERLIN. 1945-1949 Bowyer J. Bell MADRID, 1936-1939 LONDON, 1940-1941 SINGAPORE, 1941-1942 STALINGRAD, 1942-1943 WARSAW, 1939, 1943, 1944 SEVEN CITIES UNDER SIEGE JERUSALEM, 1947-1949 BERLIN, 1945-1949 A Company Chilton Books, Division of Chilton PUBLISHERS Philadelphia and New York © Copyright 1966 by Bowyer Bell. First Edition. All Rights J. Reserved. Published in Philadelphia by Chilton Company and simultaneously in Toronto, Canada, by Ambassador Books, Ltd. Designed by William E. Lickfield. Manufactured in the United States of America. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 66-22585 1369082 For John Higgins Williams Preface THE genesis of this book lies in what for years I had felt was a minor sin comparable to my addiction to the Times crossword puzzle, the reading of military history solely (or pleasure. After a time it seemed to me that one of the areas most neglected in theory and seldom exploited in narra- tive was the siege. Along with the mass cavalry charge and a major sea battle, the siege of a great city, even though a more protracted event, has long been one of warfare's most dramatic confrontations. In our century the siege has often been considered as obsolete as the castle. Originally my intention had been merely to show the persistence of the siege as a form of battle by means of several independent accounts of the more significant modern sieges. Instead, what has developed is seven case studies of seven different varieties of contemporary sieges in what I hope are authoritative, but certainly not definitive, accounts. This external ap- proach, the dependence more on the works of others than on the original documents, was chosen partly at least to appeal to the general reader. Consequently the scholarly paraphernalia has been reduced to a mini- mum and the sources quoted are works in English. In time these restric- tions proved artificial in that many of the sources are as unavailable to the average reader as if they had been left in Hebrew or Japanese; never- theless, for the most part the book is an essay rather than a monograph. The mass of material available for some of the sieges is appallingly extensive as is often the case in contemporary history with multivolume official histories, seemingly endless memoirs, and shelves of tangential accounts. In the cases of the seven sieges, no account or study by a dis- interested scholar treats the battle purely as a siege, but in nearly every case there is at least one, and often more than one, basic work, such as Dov Joseph's The Faithful City: The Siege of Jerusalem, 1948 or R. G. Colodnys The Struggle for Madrid: The Central Epic of the Spanish What Conflict (1936-1937). is undoubtedly the siege par excellence, Leningrad, has been avoided because of Leon Gome's The Siege of Leningrad. I am indebted to a variety of individuals and institutions for help in VII viii ) Preface accumulating the essential, and what at one time were supposedly going to be readily available, materials: the staff oi the New York Institute of Technology Library, in particular Richard Griffin and Patricia Rice; the vast and usually anonymous staff oi the New York Public Library; the New YIVO staff of the Zionist Archives in York, the Institute Library New in York; and all those libraries, horn Harvard University in the north to the Library oi Congress to the south, connected with the inter- library loan program. Finally I should like to thank my wiie, who has not typed chapters, read proof (Harvey Fireside did), or checked iootnotes, but who as an Egyptologist has with great patience tolerated my mis- guided interest in recent battles. J.B.B. New York City / St. Mullins, Co. Carlow
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