Military Matters
An anthology of the best writing, compiled by Aspects of History
The ever-excellent Aspects of History has created an anthology of some of the best recent writing on military history, with an introduction by yours truly. Please do buy a copy here. To whet your appetite, here’s my introduction.
In this fascinating volume the distinguished historian Margaret Macmillan suggests that war is not a biological inevitability of the human condition. That is almost certainly true, although it does seem – certainly from the flood of evidence that follows in this volume alone – that war is at least an ingrained prejudice in humankind. It has, as S.J.A. Turney, Adrian Goldsworthy and Peter Stuttard remind us in their respective studies of the Battle of Munda, the rise of Philip of Macedon and the Persian Wars, been going on for a very long time. At worst we might be able to describe it as a virulent disease for which a cure has not yet been found. There is no evidence that war has lost any of its attractiveness as a political tool and any hopes that organized violence of this kind has become history remain not merely elusive, but naïve. Both Margaret Macmillan and Richard Overy give us their considered views after two lifetimes of studying the subject. War, as Justin Marozzi reminds us of the Arab Conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries, can also irrevocably change the shape of the world. The evidence is that war is and has been an essential part of human existence. There is no proof that it is losing any of its attractiveness as a tool of power. This is not to say that it always works out as planned. K.M. Ashmans’ account of 1066 demonstrates that sometimes war as a political strategy can be very successful while on other occasions – such as Hitler declaring war on the United States in December 1941, as Charlie Laderman shows – it isn’t.
This volume, taken from the archives of 24 volumes of the brilliant Aspects of History magazine, demonstrates the extraordinary breadth of warfare as a human experience. The full panoply of war is something that is experienced by professional soldiers and conscripted civilians alike, by men, women and children. It is evidenced in small or large wars, long or short. It’s also the greatest of human dramas. But war’s misery is ultimately about people, which I suppose is one of the enduring fascinations we have with stories of war: it’s the story of people, from the big people like Napoleon, brought to life by Adam Zamoyski, to the lowest of conscripted peasants in one of the emperor’s armies marching obediently to Moscow. For that reason it is appropriate that Gavin Mortimer begins this compilation with the largely unknown story of Bill Stirling, the brother of David Stirling, who history tells us established the SAS in Egypt at the low point of British fortunes during the Second World War. As Mortimer tells us, Bill, rather than David, is the man most responsible for the establishment of this iconic regiment. The adventures of the SAS, the legend of which lives on into modern times, is also described for us by Damien Lewis.
War is a science much more than it is an art – a clear lesson from Allan Mallinson’s ‘The Shape of Battle’ – and history demonstrates that the best prepared and most proficient armed forces succeed more often than their less capable opponents. If the defence of one’s citizens has always been regarded as the primary duty of government, it means that careful thought needs to be applied to the question as to who might pose a threat to our security, and what we should do about it. I explain in the second article just how Britain failed this fundamental test in the years that followed the end of the Great War. We can all agree with Miranda Malins that war is horrible and is to be lamented. The cost in English lives during the Civil War was greater even than that of the First World War. We should nevertheless accept that preparing for war is a very good defence against it ever happening in the first place.
General David Petraeus and Lord Roberts demonstrate just how warfare can be undertaken on a limited basis without invoking nuclear Armageddon but also explain the limits of conventional war ‘among the people’, as the West was savagely reminded again in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2021. Soldiers can solve some problems, but not others, and societal change isn’t one of them. War can be cold as well as hot, as Giles Milton explains in his story of how Berlin became the melting point of a new form of warfare between 1949 and 1989.
All wars throw up their political and military leaders, some good and some bad. Readers will know of my conviction that General Bill Slim was the British general par excellence of the Second World War. In this volume Saul David suggests that it was the brilliance of the Duke of Marlborough’s Rhine and Danube Campaigns in the early eighteenth century that makes him the greatest Britain’s greatest commander of all time. Ben Kane makes his pitch for Richard the Lionheart. War can bring out the best and worst in us, the best and worst leaders. Frank McDonough convinces us that both Hitler and Stalin were as bad as each other, but Stalin – propped up by western arms and his willingness to sacrifice millions of Soviet citizens in the Wehrmacht’s voracious meatgrinder – the more competent strategist. Anthony Tucker-Jones explains just why Winston Churchill was the right man to lead Great Britain through its greatest trial, while Antony Beevor describes the brutal genius behind Vladimir Lenin and the revolutions in Russia that ushered in a century of chaos and darkness with reverberations around the world that are still being felt today.
Warfare is not a matter experienced entirely by men, of course. In the compilation the historians Helen Fry, Louise Morrish and Tessa Dunlop describe the role women have played in the conduct of hostilities, including the gathering and management of intelligence, something for which they have traditionally been very adept. War also prompts technical innovations and inventions. It is remarkable to observe the state of technology in 1945 compared to that which existed in 1939: war accelerates all sorts of technical development not least, as Matthew Willis demonstrates, in the types of long range fighters such as the P-51 Mustang which accompanied the bomber streams of the U.S.A.A.F over distant targets in occupied Europe.
War is political but has been driven by many non-political imperatives and motives. The clash of religion is one such, as we are reminded by Roger Cowley’s account of the Siege of Acre. It was a combination of religious zeal and the ability of the Arabs to organise themselves, as Justin Marozzi tells us, that enabled the great conquests across North Africa for Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries.
War, of course, is also a dramatic human adventure, captured perfectly in the fictional dramas written by two of our best novelists, Alex Gerlis and Bernard Cornwell, stories which have a strong following by readers of the Aspects magazine. For all its attendant horrors, the stories of men and women, ships, tanks and aircraft, are exciting, as Simon Read explains with the search for and destruction of Germany’s battle fleet – the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Bismarck and Tirpitz. Nicholas Best likewise describes the drama of that most British of victories, Trafalgar. This is a theme developed by Max Hastings as he retells some of the stories of soldiers in battle he has come across in a lifetime of military journalism. Andrew Richards describes the impact of war on a recent generation of British soldiers. Love it or hate it, war has played a very significant part in our history and is ingrained in the fabric of every culture on earth. This volume represents the very best of writing on the very worst of subjects.