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Ex Libris – www.ozebook.com THE STORY OF THE MALAKAND FIELD FORCE AN EPISODE OF FRONTIER WAR By Winston Churchill Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, PC, DL, FRS, Hon. RA (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British Conservative politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War. Widely regarded as one of the greatest wartime leaders of the century, he served as Prime Minister twice (1940–45 and 1951–55). A noted statesman and orator, Churchill was also an officer in the British Army, a historian, a writer, and an artist. He is the only British prime minister to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was the first person to be made an Honorary Citizen of the United States. Churchill was born into the aristocratic family of the Dukes of Marlborough. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, was a charismatic politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer; his mother, Jennie Jerome, was an American socialite. As a young army officer, he saw action in British India, the Sudan, and the Second Boer War. He gained fame as a war correspondent and wrote books about his campaigns. At the forefront of politics for fifty years, he held many political and cabinet positions. Before the First World War, he served as President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, and First Lord of the Admiralty as part of the Asquith Liberal government. During the war, he continued as First Lord of the Admiralty until the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign caused his departure from government. He then briefly resumed active army service on the Western Front as commander of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers. He returned to government as Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, and Secretary of State for Air. After the War, Churchill served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative (Baldwin) government of 1924–29, controversially returning the pound sterling in 1925 to the gold standard at its pre-war parity, a move widely seen as creating deflationary pressure on the UK economy. Also controversial was his opposition to increased home rule for India and his resistance to the 1936 abdication of Edward VIII. Out of office and politically "in the wilderness" during the 1930s, Churchill took the lead in warning about Nazi Germany and in campaigning for rearmament. On the outbreak of the Second World War, he was again appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. Following the resignation of Neville Chamberlain on 10 May 1940, Churchill became Prime Minister. His steadfast refusal to consider defeat, surrender, or a compromise peace helped inspire British resistance, especially during the difficult early days of the War when Britain stood alone in its active opposition to Adolf Hitler. Churchill was particularly noted for his speeches and radio broadcasts, which helped inspire the British people. He led Britain as Prime Minister until victory over Nazi Germany had been secured. After the Conservative Party lost the 1945 election, he became Leader of the Opposition. In 1951, he again became Prime Minister, before retiring in 1955. Upon his death, Elizabeth II granted him the honour of a state funeral, which saw one of the largest assemblies of world statesmen in history. Named the Greatest Briton of all time in a 2002 poll, Churchill is widely regarded as being among the most influential people in British history. The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War was an 1898 book written by Winston Churchill; it was his first published work of non-fiction. It details an 1897 military campaign on the Northwest Frontier (an area now part of Pakistan). Churchill participated in the campaign as a second lieutenant in the cavalry; he volunteered for the posting, having become bored of playing polo in India. Moving through the land mostly by political care, and paying local khans to support them, they moved into the mountains to fight an essentially punitive campaign against the Pashtun tribes, in response to repeated brutal armed raids on the villages of the Plains of India. Crops were burnt, wells were filled with stone and houses burnt, and the occasional firefight broke out in the mountains. This campaign effectively neutralised the aggressors for several decades. Churchill makes some observations about fanaticism of the tribal warriors:“ Every influence, every motive, that provokes the spirit of murder among men, impels these mountaineers to deeds of treachery and violence. The strong aboriginal propensity to kill, inherent in all human beings, has in these valleys been preserved in unexampled strength and vigour. That religion, which above all others was founded and propagated by the sword--the tenets and principles of which are instinct with incentives to slaughter and which in three continents has produced fighting breeds of men--stimulates a wild and merciless fanaticism. ” The Indian government was concerned about where the frontier of India should be. The Russian frontier had advanced in a few decades to the Pamirs, and there was real concern that a force of cossacks could traverse the Hindu Kush and invade India. To resist this the Forward Policy held that the passes should be held by the Indian government through its vassals. A recent uprising in Chitral, arising from a series of dynastic murders, had more or less accidentally led to a campaign to relieve the British garrison there. In the aftermath of the campaign a substantial force held the road, based at the Malakand, and subsidising local rulers. The peaceful conditions improved the lot of the Pashtuns, but eventually an uprising occurred, and the camp was attacked. The attacks were beaten off, but a force was assembled under Sir Bindon Blood to punish the aggressors, many of whom had come out of Swat and Bunerwal which had not felt the force of British power and were spoiling for a fight. A young Winston Churchill arranged to be attached to the force. In the book, Churchill observes the incredible killing power of the new breech loading weapons. The Pashtun tribesmen, sure of victory by numbers and simply overrunning British camps, were cut down en masse by repeating rifles of the British Imperial forces. Six-foot-high piles of bodies are described outside the fire trenches surrounding the temporary Brigade camps. His experiences in this campaign meant that, unlike most military thinkers of the time, he could better understand the stalemate of WWI trench warfare. This may, in years to come, have influenced his choice to invest government research and funds into the development of the tank via the Landships Committee when he was First Lord of the Admiralty. Churchill also came to believe that British imperialism could be used to establish the rule of law, promote commerce, and eventually encourage the development of stable political institutions in these regions. In sum, he maintained that the British Empire was a civilizing empire, capable of improving the physical and moral conditions of the uncivilized. Siege of Malakand The Siege of Malakand was the 26 July – 2 August 1897 siege of the British garrison in the Malakand region of colonial British India's North West Frontier Province. The British faced a force of Pashtun tribesmen whose tribal lands had been bisected by the Durand Line, the 1,519 mile (2,445 km) border between Afghanistan and British India drawn up at the end of the Anglo-Afghan wars to help hold the Russian Empire's spread of influence towards the Indian subcontinent. The unrest caused by this division of the Pashtun lands led to the rise of Saidullah, a Pashtun fakir who led an army of at least 10,000 against the British garrison in Malakand. Although the British forces were divided amongst a number of poorly defended positions, the small garrison at the camp of Malakand South and the small fort at Chakdara were both able to hold out for six days against the much larger Pashtun army. The siege was lifted when a relief column dispatched from British positions to the south was sent to assist General William Hope Meiklejohn, commander of the British forces at Malakand South. Accompanying this relief force was second lieutenant Winston Churchill, who later published his account as The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War. The rivalry between the British and the Russian Empires, named "The Great Game" by Arthur Conolly, centred on Afghanistan during the late 19th century. From the British perspective, Russian expansion threatened to destroy the so-called "jewel in the crown" of the British Empire, India. As the Tsar's troops in Central Asia began to subdue one Khanate after another, the British feared that Afghanistan would become a staging post for a Russian invasion. Against this background the British launched the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1838, and attempted to impose a puppet regime under Shuja Shah. The regime was short-lived, however, and unsustainable without British military support. After the Russians sent an uninvited diplomatic mission to Kabul in 1878, tensions were renewed and Britain demanded that the ruler of Afghanistan (Sher Ali Khan) accept a British diplomatic mission. The mission was turned back and, in retaliation, a force of 40,000 men was sent across the border by the British, launching the Second Anglo-Afghan War. After reaching a virtual stalemate with these two wars against the Afghans, the British imposed the Durand Line in 1893, which divided Afghanistan and British India (now the North-West Frontier Province, Federally Administered Tribal Areas (F.A.T.A.) and Balochistan provinces of Pakistan). Named after Sir Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary of the British Indian government, it was agreed upon by the Emir of Afghanistan (Abdur Rahman Khan) and the representatives of the British Empire but deeply resented by the Afghans.

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