1800-1859 | Battlefield butchery | Civilians slaughtered | India | Looting and plunder | Massacres | Prisoners murdered

8,000 killed and hundreds burned alive as Redcoats sack the Indian city of Jhansi

ByAlisdare Hickson

3 April 1858 On 3 April 1858, redcoats, under the command of General Sir Hugh Rose, stormed the Indian city of Jhansi, where the 22 year old Rani Lakshmibai, the legendary warrior-queen, was leading a rebellion against British rule.  Rose later proudly acknowledged that he had avenged an earlier massacre of British officers and their families…

1860-1899 | Battlefield butchery | Massacres | Sudan | Wounded killed

After the Battle of Atbara – Kitchener’s army slaughter the wounded

ByAlisdare Hickson

8 APRIL 1898 THE BATTLE OF ATBARA – A HIGHLY ASYMETRICAL CONTEST Few people In Britain today have heard of the Battle of Atbara fought on 8 April 1898, amid the arid brushland surrounding the River Atbara, a tributary of the Nile in Sudan, some 200 miles north east of Khartoum. As the sun rose,…

1500-1799 | Battlefield butchery | Burning towns and cities | Massacres | Prisoners murdered | United States

NEW LONDON BURNED AND THE GARRISON SLAUGHTERED

ByAlisdare Hickson

6 September 1781 In the late eighteenth century, New London was a small port at the mouth of the river Thames on the Connecticut coast connecting American agricultural communities with the outside world. During the American Revolutionary War, the rebels used it as a base to attack British naval vessels and their supply ships, but…

1500-1799 | Battlefield butchery | Burning towns and cities | Massacres | Prisoners murdered | United States | Wounded killed

REDCOATS SLAUGHTER AMERICAN TROOPS AFTER THEY SURRENDER

ByAlisdare Hickson

28 September 1778 During the American Revolutionary War, many British officers did not consider those ‘damn’d American rebels’, as they called recruits of George Washington’s Continental Army, to be entitled to the rights normally accorded to combatants in conflict. Major General Charles Grey was among those more committed to unforgiving cutthroat tactics, leading operations in…

1500-1799 | Battlefield butchery | Civilians slaughtered | Looting and plunder

Cromwell’s troops massacre all but ‘a very few’ of the inhabitants of Wexford

ByAlisdare Hickson

11 October 1649 Today in 1649, the inhabitants of Wexford were massacred by British troops. One month earlier [ 11 September 1649 ] Oliver Cromwell, commanding British parliamentary forces in Ireland, had ordered his soldiers to offer no quarter to the royalist garrison at Drogheda, and had slaughtered almost all those who had surrendered, along…

1500-1799 | Battlefield butchery | Burning villages | Civilians slaughtered | Collective punishments | Prisoners murdered | Punitive operations | Scotland | Wounded killed

‘PERFIDIOUS’ HIGHLANDERS ‘MUST PERISH BY SWORD OR FAMINE’

ByAlisdare Hickson

16 APRIL 1746 During the autumn of 1745, Jacobite rebels, led by ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie,’ and desiring to replace the Hanoverian king George II with the prince’s catholic father, James Stuart, marched on London, reaching as far south as Derby before they retreated to Scotland. The rebellion was motivated by a range of complex issues,…

1860-1899 | Battlefield butchery | Burning crops | Burning villages | Civilians slaughtered | Collective punishments | Livestock targeted

Colonial troops slaughter hundreds in Natal

ByAlisdare Hickson

14 December 1873 On 14 December 1873, John Colenso, the Bishop of Natal, wrote a letter to Frederick Chesson, the secretary of the London Aborigines Protection Society. He informed him that colonial troops had killed ‘hundreds of (Hlubi) men’ and that ‘hundreds of women and children’ had been taken prisoner, adding that a proclamation had…

1940-1949 | Battlefield butchery | Indonesia | Massacres

British troops kill 10,000 Indonesians in battle to reassert Dutch colonial rule

ByAlisdare Hickson

10 November 1945 On 10 November 1945, 24,000 British troops began a large scale assault on the Indonesian city of Surabaya, where nationalist forces, equipped with weapons they had seized from Japanese troops, were determined to defend their newly acquired independence.  Several days earlier, a British brigadier, Aubortin Mallaby, had been killed in the city,…

1940-1949 | Battlefield butchery | Burning towns and cities | Civilians slaughtered | Massacres | VIetnam

British kill hundreds of Vietnamese and burn large areas of Saigon

ByAlisdare Hickson

23 September 1945 On 23 September 1945, the British army in Vietnam backed a French coup in Saigon, the former capital of French Indo-China, with the aim of restoring colonial rule.  General Douglas Gracey with a force of British troops had arrived two weeks earlier on 6 September, soon after Japanese forces surrendered at the…

1860-1899 | Battlefield butchery | Egypt | Massacres | Wounded killed

Mass slaughter of the Egyptian wounded

ByAlisdare Hickson

13 September 1882 Today in 1882, a British army advancing on Cairo, under the command of General Sir Garnet Wolseley, butchered hundreds of Egyptians, who were either fleeing for their lives or lying wounded and helpless on the battlefield of Tel el-Kebir.  A reporter who watched the battle, informed his readers that British cavalry committed ‘fearful…