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Fortification and Military Engineering
dodgermuk


Joined: 19 Mar 2006
Posts: 38
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Hi,

Just a curious question really. I posses two books which have been handed down to me from my great-grandfather. They are 'Fortification and Military Engineering - Part I and II (The Royal Military Academy, Woolwich) dated 1886 and 1884.

Books like these get updated over the years to accomadate for the changes in military engineering and i know the dates of these two books are outside the AZW era but do you think that part of what is contained in these books may have been used by cadets at the academy during the AZW era or do you think that these two books are totaly new ones for the era they were published in and have no connection to military engineering taken place during the AZW era?

Rog
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Sawubona


Joined: 09 Nov 2005
Posts: 1179
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Dodge,
I'm no expert, but my thinking is that this period, the late Nineteenth Century, was a time of incredibly rapid changes in the evolution of military hardware, artillery in particular. There's a massive granite fort in my area that was begun in about 1861 (the beginning of our Civil War) upon which construction was abandoned in 1863 because it would have been obsolete by the time it was completed! Any modern warship of the period would have calmly sat out of range of its fifty some odd Rodman cannon and pounded it to rubble with it's eleven inch guns.

On the other hand, the lack of sophistication of the Zulu or most other colonial opponents for that matter would lead me to think that any theories on military engineering from even the Napoleonic Wars would be current enough to get the job done. I guess what I'm saying is that most of what they learned at Woolwich would be superfluous in the AZW, but the engineering that was applied in that conflict would be found in texts dated well beyond 1886.
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Bill Cainan1


Joined: 01 Sep 2005
Posts: 107
Location: Lampeter
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Dodge

See if you can get hold of a copy of "A Widow-Making War" edited by Howard whitehouse, being the diary of Major Wynne who commanded the Sapper Company with Pearson's column and went on to design and supervise the construction of the fort at Eshowe. Also Ian Knight's Osprey booklet "British Fortifications in Zululand 1879".

Bill

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Bill Cainan
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dodgermuk


Joined: 19 Mar 2006
Posts: 38
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Thankyou both for your replies.

Bill, i will certainly look for those books, many thanks.

Rog
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Sawubona


Joined: 09 Nov 2005
Posts: 1179
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And as we're all probably aware, Wynne died (of cholera, wasn't it?) in Zululand and is buried there. I just thought it "right" to add that footnote.
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Galloglas
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dodgermuk

The Royal Engineer Museum at Chatham would probably be delighted to receive your books if you felt you would like to bequeath or gift them.

Curiously thoiugh probably because they were such mudane items in their day they did not keep a continuous series of them as one succeeded the other.

So they have a very few 19th and 20thC editions and huge gaps in the series.

G
Fortification and Military Engineering
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