The First Anglo-Afghan War - Part Three: The Kabul Uprising That Turned Occupation into Disaster

The First Anglo-Afghan War - Part Three: The Kabul Uprising That Turned Occupation into Disaster

For two years, British leaders had tried to convince themselves that Kabul was under control.

Akbar Khan

Date: 1842

Artist: Vincent Eyre

Then, on the 2nd of November 1841, a crowd gathered outside the home of one British officer.

Within hours, he was dead.

And the British occupation of Kabul was beginning to fall apart.

In Part Two, we saw how British and East India Company forces had captured Kabul and restored Shah Shuja to the Afghan throne. At first, the invasion seemed to have been a success. But beneath the surface, resentment was growing.

Alexander Burnes

Date: 1843

Collection: British Museum

Shah Shuja was still deeply unpopular with many Afghans, while the continuing presence of foreign troops was causing increasing hostility. British officials had also been paying subsidies to tribal leaders to maintain their support and help keep important routes open. When some of those payments were reduced, an already dangerous situation became even more unstable.

Image info:

General William Elphinstone

Date: 1836 - 1839

Artist: William Salter

There was another serious problem.

Instead of remaining inside the formidable Bala Hissar fortress, much of the British force was based in a poorly positioned cantonment outside Kabul. Thousands of British and Indian troops, servants and camp followers were living in a position that would be extremely difficult to defend if the city rose against them.

On the morning of the 2nd of November 1841, that danger became very real.

A crowd gathered outside the Kabul home of Sir Alexander Burnes, the Scottish explorer and political officer who had played an important part in British involvement in Afghanistan.

The situation rapidly turned violent.

Burnes, his brother Charles and others with them were killed, and the house was looted.

But what happened next was just as important.

The British response was hesitant.

Major-General William Elphinstone, who commanded the garrison, was in poor health and increasingly unable to provide the decisive leadership the crisis demanded. While British commanders debated what to do, the uprising spread and resistance gathered strength.

What might once have been contained was becoming something much larger.

On the 5th of November, Afghan fighters captured the main commissariat fort, containing much of the British garrison’s food and other essential supplies.

Food and other vital supplies were lost.

Winter was approaching.

And the British position was becoming weaker by the day.

The uprising soon got an important leader in Muhammad Akbar Khan, the son of the deposed ruler Dost Mohammad. Opposition to the occupation was now developing into a wider insurrection, and the British found themselves increasingly trapped.

Sir William Macnaghten, the senior British political representative in Kabul, attempted to negotiate a way out.

But on the 23rd of December 1841, during negotiations with Akbar Khan, Macnaghten was killed.

By then, the situation had changed completely.

The force that had marched triumphantly into Kabul in 1839 was no longer in control.

Its supplies were dwindling. Its leadership was divided. Armed resistance surrounded it. And the freezing Afghan winter was closing in.

The British now faced a terrible decision.

Remain in Kabul and try to recover the situation...

Or leave.

In January 1842, they were forced into agreeing to withdraw.

And what happened next would turn a failing occupation into one of the most infamous disasters in British military history.

Part Four: The Retreat from Kabul – When an Army Disappeared into the Snow

Had you heard about the Kabul uprising before, or only about the disastrous retreat that followed?

The Evacuee Children Who Waited While Strangers Decided Whether They Wanted Them

The Evacuee Children Who Waited While Strangers Decided Whether They Wanted Them

Imagine being seven or eight years old.

You have already said goodbye to your mum and dad, travelled to somewhere you have probably never been before and you are carrying a small case, your gas mask and a label with your name on it.

And then you find out that you still do not know where you are going to sleep that night.

Today I want to look at one of the most unsettling parts of the wartime evacuation: how children were actually found homes once they reached the countryside.

When the great evacuation began in September 1939, children usually travelled with their schools and teachers to designated reception areas. Around 1.5 million people were evacuated during the first three days alone, including hundreds of thousands of children.

But getting them off the trains was just the start.

Many were taken to schools, church halls, village halls or other reception centres while local billeting officers tried to find them all homes.

In some places, people came to the reception centre and chose the children that they were willing to take. The National Archives describes local people walking around and selecting children, some evacuees later remembered that it felt  like being at a cattle market.

Just imagine what that must have felt like.

One child disappears with a smiling couple.

Then another.

Perhaps somebody takes two sisters together.

Another woman wants a little girl.

A farmer might prefer an older boy who could work.

And slowly the room empties.

What if you were still standing there?

For some evacuees, being one of the last children to be chosen became one of the memories that stayed with them for the rest of their lives. Accounts describe children sitting or standing while strangers looked them over before deciding who they would take. Some former evacuees later compared the experience of waiting to be chosen to being at a cattle market.

It is difficult not to think about what might have gone through a child's mind.

Why doesn't anybody want me?

Is there something wrong with me?

Where am I going to end up?

Of course, not every evacuation was like this. In many places billeting officers allocated children directly to particular houses, and thousands of evacuees were welcomed into homes where they were treated with enormous kindness. Some formed relationships with their wartime families that lasted for decades.

But there was another question I had always wondered about.

Who were these people taking the children in, and were they vetted?

Before the war, local authorities had carried out a huge survey of accommodation in reception areas, looking at how much space was available in houses and other buildings. But this was not vetting in the modern safeguarding sense. Accommodation surveys concentrated heavily on finding suitable available space. Although billeting officers and other officials could inspect and supervise billets, there was nothing resembling the modern system of safeguarding and background checks that we would expect today, and standards of inspection and follow-up varied between areas.

Billeting officers and local officials were supposed to remain involved, and concerns about inspecting billets and supervising children's welfare were raised during the war. But arrangements could vary considerably from one area to another.

And did every family happily volunteer to take a child?

No.

Many genuinely wanted to help. They opened their homes willingly, cared for the children and sometimes came to see them almost as members of their own families.

Others were much less enthusiastic.

The government had powers to compel householders in reception areas to provide accommodation when necessary, and the possibility of compulsory billeting had been built into evacuation planning before the war.

So somewhere among those frightened children were youngsters being taken into homes who had not necessarily wanted them there in the first place.

For some children, evacuation became an adventure.

For others, it brought kindness and a second family.

And for some, it left memories of homesickness, rejection or simply standing in a village hall watching everyone else being chosen first.

That is the part of evacuation photographs cannot always show.

Were you evacuated during the war, or did your parents or grandparents ever tell you what it was really like? And did anyone in your family take an evacuee into their home? I would love to hear the memories that have been passed down through families.

The Exeter Conspiracy: The Alleged Tudor Plot That Destroyed Henry VIII’s Royal Cousins

The Exeter Conspiracy: The Alleged Tudor Plot That Destroyed Henry VIII’s Royal Cousins

We have been finding out about some of the people surrounding Reginald Pole and Henry VIII, including members of the powerful Pole and Courtenay families.

And today I wanted to discover more about the event that brought several of them crashing down.

The Exeter Conspiracy.

By 1538, Henry VIII had broken with Rome, declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England and faced serious opposition from people who remained loyal to the Catholic Church.

One of his most outspoken opponents was Cardinal Reginald Pole.

Pole was safely abroad, beyond Henry’s immediate reach, but his family was still in England. That was particularly dangerous because the Poles were not simply another noble family. Through their mother, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, they had Plantagenet royal blood.

And they were not the only ones.

Henry Courtenay

Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, was Henry VIII’s first cousin. His mother, Catherine of York, was the younger sister of Henry’s mother, Elizabeth of York, making Courtenay another man with a strong royal connection.

In Tudor England, royal blood could be a wonderful thing.

Right up until the king decided it made you a threat.

The situation became increasingly dangerous during 1538.

Reginald Pole

Geoffrey Pole, Reginald’s younger brother, was arrested in August and subjected to questioning. Under interrogation, he revealed details of conversations involving his brother Henry Pole, Lord Montagu, and Henry Courtenay.

The men had reportedly discussed the king, religion and Reginald Pole, and there were accusations that some had expressed sympathy with opposition to Henry’s religious policies.

There were also connections between members of the group and Reginald Pole, who had openly condemned Henry’s actions.

For a king already concerned about rebellion and the possibility of foreign intervention, this was enough to look extremely threatening.

The so-called Exeter Conspiracy began to take shape.

Henry Courtenay and Henry Pole were arrested in November 1538, along with others. They were accused of treason and of involvement in plans against the king.

But this is where the story becomes more complicated.

Historians have debated whether there really was a developed conspiracy to remove Henry VIII from the throne. There certainly appears to have been discontent, dangerous conversations and contact with people Henry considered his enemies. Whether that amounted to a genuine organised plan for rebellion is much less certain.

Henry was not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Sir Edward Neville was executed on the 8th of December 1538.

Henry Courtenay followed on the 9th of December.

Henry Pole, Lord Montagu, was executed on the 9th of January 1539.

Geoffrey Pole, whose evidence had helped implicate the others, was sentenced to death but eventually pardoned.

The consequences didn’t end there.

Margaret Pole

Margaret Pole was imprisoned and eventually committed to the Tower in late 1539, where she remained until Henry VIII ordered her execution in 1541.

Reginald Pole remained out of Henry’s reach.

The Exeter Conspiracy did more than uncover possible opposition to the king. It helped to devastate two powerful families whose royal blood, Catholic connections and relationship with Reginald Pole had made them dangerously suspicious in Henry VIII’s England.

But was Henry VIII uncovering a genuine conspiracy?

Or eliminating people he feared might one day become his enemies?

Operation Pied Piper: The Wartime Evacuation That Turned Childhood Upside Down

Operation Pied Piper: The Wartime Evacuation That Turned Childhood Upside Down

For the next little while, I want to move away from the stories of the remarkable people who helped Jewish people during the Second World War and turn our attention to another group whose lives were changed completely by the conflict - the children.

War is often remembered through the eyes of adults, those who fought abroad or those who struggled to keep life going at home.

But we can sometimes overlook the children whose lives were turned upside down almost overnight.

On the 1st of September 1939, two days before Britain declared war on Germany, a huge evacuation programme began.

It became known as Operation Pied Piper.

The British government were worried that German bombing would cause enormous casualties in major towns and cities. Plans were made to move children and other vulnerable people away from areas that were considered most at risk.

Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of children were preparing to leave home.

Imagine being only six or seven years old and arriving at a crowded railway station, carrying a small suitcase, a gas mask and a label attached to your clothes.

You might not know where you were going.

You might not know who you would be living with.

And perhaps most frighteningly, you might not know when you would see your parents again.

Many children travelled with their schools, accompanied by teachers and other helpers. They took trains out of cities including London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham towards smaller towns, villages and countryside, these areas were considered safer.

For some children, the journey might have been exciting at first.

For others, it would have been frightening and confusing.

And arriving at their destination brought another uncertainty.

Groups of children could be taken to schools, churches or village halls while local families came forward to provide them with somewhere to stay.

Some were welcomed into warm and loving homes.

Others were not so fortunate.

Brothers and sisters could sometimes be separated, and children found themselves living with complete strangers in surroundings that were very different from anything they had known before.

For a child growing up in a crowded city street, suddenly finding themselves on a farm surrounded by fields and animals could feel very scary.

Homesickness was all too common.

Many children missed their parents and letters became incredibly important.

During the first few days of Operation Pied Piper, around 1.5 million people were evacuated, including schoolchildren, mothers with young children and other vulnerable people.

But the bombing that everyone had feared did not immediately arrive.

During the months that became known as the Phoney War, many evacuated children starting returning home.

Then the danger started again.

As the bombings intensified in 1940, particularly during the Blitz, many children were evacuated again.

For some, wartime childhood became a cycle of leaving home, returning and then being sent away again.

Operation Pied Piper was intended to protect children from the bombs.

But behind those famous photographs of children carrying suitcases and wearing name labels were thousands of individual stories of fear, adventure, loneliness, kindness and uncertainty.

Because the Second World War did not only change the lives of those who fought it.

It changed childhood too.

Why William of Normandy Thought England’s Crown Was His - Before Harold Took It Instead

Why William of Normandy Thought England’s Crown Was His - Before Harold Took It Instead

 

A king dies without a child to inherit his throne, several powerful men decide they should replace him, and suddenly England has a rather serious problem.

 

Today I want to start a new series looking at the Norman Conquest and the extraordinary events that led to one of the most famous years in English history: 1066.

 

And I thought we should start with a simple question.

 

Why did William, Duke of Normandy, believe that the English crown belonged to him?

 

To understand that, we need to go back to Edward the Confessor.

 

Edward became King of England in 1042. He was married to Edith, the daughter of the powerful Earl Godwin, but the couple had no children. That meant there was no obvious son waiting to inherit the throne.

 

Never ideal when you are a medieval king.

 

William was Duke of Normandy and was related to Edward through Edward’s mother, Emma of Normandy. Edward had also spent many years in Normandy before becoming king, so there were already strong connections between the English royal family and the Norman court.

 

According to Norman accounts, Edward promised William that he would succeed him as King of England.

 

Whether that promise was really made - and exactly what Edward intended - has been debated ever since.

 

But William certainly believed, or at least claimed, that he had been promised the crown.

 

Then things became even more complicated.

 

Sometime around 1064, Harold Godwinson, one of the most powerful men in England and the brother of Queen Edith, crossed the Channel and eventually found himself at William’s court.

 

Norman sources later claimed that Harold swore an oath supporting William’s claim to the English throne.

 

And this was not supposed to be an ordinary promise.

 

According to the story shown in the Bayeux Tapestry, Harold swore the oath over sacred relics.

 

In medieval Europe, breaking such an oath was a very serious matter.

 

Unfortunately for William, Harold apparently had other ideas.

 

Edward the Confessor died on the 5^th of January 1066.

 

Harold claimed that, before his death, Edward had named him as his successor. The English nobles accepted Harold, and he was crowned King Harold II almost immediately.

 

You can probably imagine William’s reaction when the news reached Normandy.

 

He believed Edward had promised him the throne.

 

He believed Harold had sworn to support him.

 

And now Harold was sitting on the English throne wearing the crown himself.

 

William regarded Harold as an oath-breaker and a usurper and began preparing an invasion.

 

But Harold and William were not the only men interested in England.

 

Across the North Sea, the formidable Norwegian king Harald Hardrada also believed he had a claim.

 

So England entered 1066 with a new king, an angry Norman duke preparing a fleet and a Norwegian warrior king watching from across the sea.

 

It was not going to be a peaceful year.

 

In the next part of this new series, I want to look at the men who believed they had the right to rule England - including one young claimant who is often forgotten - and why Harold Godwinson’s new crown was already in serious danger.

 

Karl Plagge: The German Officer Who Used His Position to Save Jewish Lives

Karl Plagge: The German Officer Who Used His Position to Save Jewish Lives

How do you save people when you are wearing the uniform of the very regime that wants them dead?

Today I want to find out a little bit about Karl Plagge, a German army officer who used his position in the Second World War to protect Jewish men, women and children in occupied Lithuania.

Karl was born in Darmstadt, Germany, on the 10th of July 1897. During the First World War, he served on the Western Front and was later held as a prisoner of war. While he was in captivity he contracted polio, which left him with a permanent disability in his left leg.

After returning home, Karl studied engineering and qualified in 1924. Like many Germans struggling through the difficult years that followed the First World War, he became attracted to the promises of national recovery. In 1931, he joined the National Socialist Party.

It was a decision he would later question.

Karl increasingly rejected the racial beliefs. He refused to teach their racial ideology while working as a lecturer and he eventually withdrew from active involvement with the party.

When the Second World War started, Karl was called into the German Army. By 1941 he was commanding HKP 562, an army vehicle repair unit that was eventually based in Vilnius, Lithuania.

There he witnessed the brutal persecution of Jewish people.

Karl realised that his position gave him something incredibly valuable: the ability to declare people essential workers.

He began issuing work certificates to Jewish men, sometimes claiming they possessed specialist skills they did not actually have. These documents could offer temporary protection not only to the men themselves but also to members of their families.

Karl repeatedly tried to keep his Jewish workers away from the authorities. When workers were arrested, he sometimes intervened and attempted to have them released. He also tolerated activities that helped prisoners obtain desperately needed food.

By 1943, the situation in Vilnius had become even more dangerous. The Germans were preparing to destroy the Vilna Ghetto.

Karl managed to establish a separate forced labour camp for his unit at HKP 562. More than 1,000 Jewish workers and family members were transferred there before the ghetto was liquidated.

Life inside the camp was still frightening and dangerous. Karl did not have complete control, and killings were still carried out. In March 1944, while Karl was away, approximately 250 children and elderly prisoners were taken from the camp and murdered.

He could not save everyone.

But he continued trying to protect as many people as his position allowed.

Then, during the summer of 1944, the Soviet Red Army began approaching Vilnius. Karl understood what was likely to happen next. The authorities would not simply abandon the remaining Jewish prisoners.

On the 1st of July, he spoke to the people in the camp while an officer was present. He could not openly tell them to hide, so his warning had to be carefully disguised.

He explained that the camp would soon be evacuated and that the prisoners would be accompanied by the authorities.

The meaning was clear.

Many prisoners immediately prepared hiding places in walls, attics and concealed rooms.

When the authorities arrived several days later, hundreds of prisoners were taken away and murdered. Others remained hidden.

Around 150 to 200 people survived long enough to be liberated when Soviet forces reached the area.

After the war, Karl faced a denazification court because of his earlier Party membership and his wartime position. Jewish survivors came forward and spoke about what he had done for them.

Karl never considered himself a hero. He believed that other people could also have chosen to act if they had been determined enough to do so.

He died in Darmstadt on the 19th of June 1957, at the age of 59.

For many years his actions were little known outside the families of those he had helped. Eventually, survivors and their descendants worked to bring his story to wider attention.

In 2005, Karl Plagge was posthumously honoured at Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, following the decision to recognise him the previous year.

His story is particularly complicated because Karl had once joined the National Socialist Party and later served in the German Army. But when confronted with persecution and murder, he chose to use the authority that uniform gave him to protect people instead.

Perhaps that is what makes his story so powerful.

When the system around him demanded obedience, Karl Plagge found ways to disobey it - and because he did, people survived.

The First Anglo-Afghan War - Part Two: Britain Took Kabul - But Disaster Was on the Horizon

 

The First Anglo-Afghan War - Part Two: Britain Took Kabul - But Disaster Was on the Horizon

In Part One, we found out why Britain invaded Afghanistan in 1839 and why Dost Mohammad Khan was seen as a problem for the British in India.

Today I want to continue the story and find out how British and Indian forces advanced through Afghanistan, captured the fortress of Ghazni and eventually entered Kabul.

At first, the campaign appeared to be going well.

The Army of the Indus had entered Afghanistan with the intention of removing Dost Mohammad and restoring the former ruler Shah Shuja to the throne.

Their first major objective was Kandahar.

As the army approached, the local rulers fled and Kandahar was occupied without a major battle. Shah Shuja was proclaimed ruler there, and for the British it seemed that their plan was working.

But Kabul still lay ahead.

One of the biggest obstacles on the route was the powerful fortress of Ghazni.

The fortress was surrounded by high walls and it looked extremely difficult to capture. To make matters even worse, much of the heavy artillery normally needed for a siege had been left behind because transporting it across the difficult Afghan terrain had proved to be challenging.

The British therefore needed to find another way inside.

They learned that one of the gates was less heavily defended than the others.

Before dawn on the 23rd of July 1839, engineers from the British-led force placed explosives against the gate and blew it open.

Troops then rushed through.

Fierce fighting followed inside the fortress, but Ghazni eventually fell to the British-led force.

The victory was enormously important.

Not only had a major obstacle on the road to Kabul been removed, but the fall of Ghazni also weakened Dost Mohammad's position.

As the invading army continued towards Kabul, Dost Mohammad realised that he could no longer hold the capital and withdrew.

This meant that Kabul itself did not have to be taken in a huge battle.

On the 7th of August 1839, Shah Shuja entered Kabul accompanied by British and Indian troops.

On the surface, Britain had achieved exactly what it had wanted.

Dost Mohammad had been driven from power.

Shah Shuja had been restored.

And Kabul had fallen into British hands.

It must have seemed as though the war had been won remarkably quickly.

But there was a much bigger problem.

Shah Shuja's return depended heavily upon foreign troops, and many Afghans did not accept him as their legitimate ruler.

British forces also remained in Afghanistan to keep him in power.

So although the invasion had succeeded militarily, resentment was beginning to grow under the surface.

The British had managed to take Kabul.

Keeping control of it would be far more difficult.

And within only a few years, this apparently successful campaign would end in one of the most infamous disasters in British military history.

In Part Three, we will look at what happened when anger towards Shah Shuja and the British presence in Kabul began to turn into open rebellion.

Do you think Britain made the mistake of assuming that capturing Kabul meant Afghanistan had been conquered?

 

Image info:

Collection: UK National Army Museum

Date: 1839

Artist: W Taylor