Mighty. Glorious. Useless

In my previous post, I wrote about the crass ineptitude of leaders – in this case military leaders – who sent nearly quarter of a million young men to their deaths in the Gallipoli campaign. That figure, incidentally, only covers the men over whom they had authority. There were nearly 50,000 French casualties too. Meanwhile, the casualties on the Turkish side, for which the men who launched the landings were indirectly responsible, were even higher.

Since writing that post, I’ve been on a trip in the course of which I found myself with a couple of hours to spare in Stockholm. I took the opportunity to visit a museum dedicated by the Swedes to another monument to incompetence.

This is the Vasa museum. The Vasa was a magnificent, heavily armed battleship launched by the Swedish navy in 1628. Note that I wrote ‘magnificent’ but not ‘state-of-the-art’. The museum exhibit frequently repeats and heavily stresses the words ‘the power and the glory’. This ship was designed to express power and glory, specifically of the Swedish king of the time, Gustavus Adolphus.

I have a strange personal relationship to that monarch. When I was about ten, my history teacher spent some time teaching my class about the Thirty Years’ War. At the end, he held a kind of impromptu, verbal test in which he ran through the story again and would interrupt the narration every now and then to ask the class a question. You know, things like ‘who led the Austrian forces at that battle?’ or ‘which King issued that decree?’ Eager to please, I kept leaping in with the answer ‘Gustavus Adolphus’ and was wrong every time. It may have been that I just liked the name. Eventually, the teacher asked a question which he actually addressed, by name, to me.

‘Louis the thirteenth,’ I said.

He flung up his hands in despair.

‘No,’ he cried, ‘Gustavus Adolphus.’

Sweden’s policy of strict neutrality in foreign wars now has a three-century pedigree and has served the country well, judging by its prosperity. A lesson more warlike nations would do well to remember. Glory may be glorious but it puts no bread in anyone’s basket.

Back then, though, like Britain or the United States today, Sweden still hadn’t learned that lesson. Gustavus Adolphus wanted other nations, notably (just then) the contemptible Poles, under (horror of horrors) a Catholic King who (to make this worse) was also his cousin. His shiny new ship was just what he needed. It would dominate the Baltic and have that ghastly cousin Sigismund III of Poland-Lithuania quaking in his boots.

Looking down the length of the Vasa

To make the point all the more clearly, it had a particular magnificent sterncastle. That’s the bit at the back. Stepped decks, soaring upwards, full of splendour, adorned with statues carved from wood and brightly painted, the structure could also be used as a fighting platform for riflemen in close combat. Along with the ship’s main armament of 48 cannon, it must have given the ship a daunting presence.

Sadly, it also had bit of a minor drawback. Perhaps, as the event would prove, not that minor. The height of the sterncastle made the ship just a tad unstable.

Just a bit more than a tad, to be strictly truthful. Indeed, after its splendid launch, setting out to show the Poles and any friends they might have a thing or two, it managed to get just 1.4 kilometres down the channel towards the Baltic. There, in the words of the exhibition documentation, it ran into trouble when it first met a wind stronger than a slight breeze.

Not to sugarcoat it too much, it turned over. And promptly sank.

A fair bit of power. Lots of glory. But absolutely no use to anyone.

Ornate and elaborate:
nothing stern about the Vasa's stern

Well, that’s not quite true. It lay at the bottom of the harbour for nearly three and a half centuries, at which point the Swedes brought it back up to the surface and set about restoration work. The waters and silt at the bottom had clearly been kind to the ship, because – again according to the museum – 95% of the structure of the ship now on display is original.

There it stands ready to impress anyone with an hour or so to spare. Tall, graceful, a fine monument to power and glory. And a fair measure of futility.

Impress and amuse, perhaps, would be more accurate.