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Ivan’s War — Catherine Merridale

Published on January 25, 20121 Comment

Cover of Ivan's War

Ivan’s War
Catherine Merridale
396 pages including index
published in 2005

Though things have improved a lot since the end of the Cold War, the Eastern Front is still underrepresented in western histories of World War II. Quite naturally British and American historians have focused mostly on their own countries’ experiences in the war but even so the Russian experience is still under-represented. And often when the Eastern Front is looked at, it is from a German rather than a Russian perspective. German historians, generals and others were quite quick in putting forward their experiences in order to put the record straight in their favour, German sources were much more available to western historians than Russian sources, stuck behind the Iron Curtain as they were. So we got plenty of Konsalik novels talking about poor, intelligent middle class German officers stuck in the hell of the Ostfront facing the Slavic hordes, not so much about the poor Russian soldiers trying to liberate their homelands. What’s more, Cold War ideology, which presented an outnumbered NATO alliance trying to defend itself against the vast communist tank armies poised to overrun Western Europe at any moment, quite easily identified itself with the German experience and was fed by the same German generals that had been defeated by the Russians on how best to fight the bolshevik menace.

So it’s good to see a book like Ivan’s War be published. It’s the first book I’ve read about the Eastern Front that looks at the war there not just through a Russian perspective, but looks at the ordinary soldier’s experiences, somewhat comparable to e.g. Stud Terkel’s “The Good War” about American experiences of WWII. Catherine Merridale went to Russia not just to look at archives long inaccessible to western scholars, but also to talk to the veterans themselves and get their stories. What’s more, she didn’t just show the stories of the common soldiers, but also those of their officers and political commissars too and does so without editorialising. It’s important to hear those stories, to get an idea of what the Great Patriotic War was really like for those who fought it, without seeing it filtered through American or Western European, let alone German eyes for a change.

But, as she makes clear, there are some unique difficulties in writing such a book about Soviet soldiers. Our own western view of World War II may have its distortions, but there never quite was a systemic effort to bring it in line with government ideology, to proof the legitimacy of an entire way of life, which is what happened in Russia. From the start of the war certain embarassing truths have been airbrushed away and have only been open for discussion in the last few decades and even then it’s controversial. Many of the veterans themselves have completely embraced the idea of WWII as the Great Patriotic War, with everybody standing firm behind Stalin. The realities of their wartime experiences has often been replaced by this much more comforting myth.

The reality was of course that the Soviet Union was completely unprepared for the German attack, struggled for a long time to come up with the right strategies and tactics to stop and defeat the nazis, that Stalin like Hitler would later send hundreds of thousands of hard to replace soldiers to death or captivity by ordering them to defend the indefensible. The lifes of ordinary soldiers never was a real consideration in the general staff’s plans, while equipment and weaponry was often lacking, especially in the early years with the USSR still on the defence.

The average soldier and officer both therefore had a much harsher time of it then their western or even German counterparts. He or she — because many more women fought in the Russian armed forced than they did in any other army — didn’t often even have the comfort of the company of friends and comrades, because the casuality rate was so high that the sort of close knit platoons familiar from Hollywood war movies rarely could happen. It’s no wonder therefore that many veterans after the war rather believed the governmentally ordained myths than their own realities, especially after the war receded further and further into memory.

Ivan’s War is a good corrective to the standard, German inspired view of the war on the East Front of technologically superior nazi superwarriors against overwhelming Asiatic hordes of barbaric soldiers who knew no pain or fear winning the war just through sheer numerical weight. It gives the Soviet soldier a face, an identity other than that of the enemy that first the nazis and then our own Cold War ideology wanted to reduce him to.

War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559 — Steven Gunn, David Grummitt & Hans Cools

Published on January 21, 2012Leave a comment

Cover of War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559

War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559
Steven Gunn, David Grummitt & Hans Cools
395 pages including index
published in 2007

Everything the authors tried to achieve with this book is in the title, but whether they succeeded is another question. Based on a massive research project that was carried out between 1999 and 2002, what the book was intended to be was a comparative study of two roughly similar countries in a period critical to Early Modern European history, to determine the impact of war both on society and the (semi-modern) state. As the authors argue, both England and the Netherlands (meaning what we would now call the Low Countries) were sort of outliers in Europe, neither quite fitting in “conventional narratives of the growth of state power”, not as centralised as other countries and with a greater level of democracy. For English historians, an added advantage of this comparison is that it puts England back into an European context by showing the simularities and differences between the two countries’ experiences.

War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559 is impressive and interesting but what it lacks is that comparative aspect that the title and introduction promises. It’s more a parallel than a comparative history, with developments in the two countries looked at side by side. So you’d have a section on the defence of towns looking first at how English towns dealt with fortifications, then at how Dutch towns did the same, but nothing much on how they differed or why they did. This lack of analysis wasn’t that big a problem for me personally because I found the subject interesting enough already.

To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded had this been concerned only about the Netherlands, as this particular period is just so much more interesting in Dutch/Belgian history than it is in English history, what with those boring Tudors and all. At the start of the period the Netherlands are still very much a collection of countries under the shadow of Burgundy; at the end of the period it’s unified under the Hapsburgs, mostly during the reign of Charles V. Yet the Netherlands remained a patchwork of principalities and overlapping loyalties with counts, provinces and even cities making their own policies, like Holland sending naval forces to the Baltic to protect its trade there on several occasions, with no regard for wider Hapsburg concerns…

War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559 is divided in five parts, with a short introduction and shorter conclusion making two parts and the heft of the book being the three middle parts: towns at war, nobles at war and subjects at war. Each is build up in roughly the same way, with an introduction, at look at the resources towns, nobles or subjects have to bring to war, moving on to how each groups experiences war, how war influences each group’s identity and finally a short conclusion/summing up. It’s all written very well and concisely, with plenty of interesting examples and anecdotes. Despite three authors, there are no real differences in the writing styles between the chapters. As said, each part and each section and subsection in each part deals with both the English and the Dutch experiences; for the most part the Netherlands sections are richer in detail and more interesting.

This book is worth reading just for those details, for the portrait it sketches of an interesting period in Netherlands history, and to a lesser extent, in English history. It doesn’t quite live up to its title, but it’s worthwhile nonetheless.

Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610-1715 — John A. Lynn

Published on January 13, 2012Leave a comment

Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610-1715

Giant of the Grand Siècle: The French Army 1610-1715
John A. Lynn
652 pages including index
published in 1997

I keep safe the memory of an invisible giant. The Son of kings, this armed colossus once towered above his foes to bestride a continent. He ate an mountain of bread and drank a river of wine at each meal. Yet historians renowned for being the most forward looking and sophisticated in skill and interpretation, fail to see him; they write as if he never existed. He must be invisible. Otherwise, how could something so big, so costly, and so powerful remain so long unnoticed? This book is a portrait of that giant, the French army of the grand siècle, made visible again.

A historian who opens his book with these words obviously has an axe to grind and once again I had the feeling of coming into an argument without knowing the particulars or the people involved. It’s a feeling I’ve gotten used to in the past few years as I’ve been reading the more serious history books rather than sticking to pop history. The more history you need, the more you realise that there are no certainties in history, but many historians can be quite certain about a colleague’s flawed theories…

Sniping aside, Giant of the Grand Siècle is an excellent synthesis history of the French army in the age of the Sun King, Louis XIV, an age when France became Europe’s predominant superpower. What John Lynn attempts to to here is to provide a portrait of this army as it really was, something that hasn’t been done before, at least not to his satisfaction. In his preface he argues that what attention the French army of this period has gotten from historians has either focused too much on the soldier in a social context, ignoring his role as a warrior or, when looked at by military historians, has been only written about in service of theorising about the supposed military revolution that took place in this century. Lynn is dismissive of both approaches and states that he will try to show the real army and show that instead of revolution, it went through a long evolution as it adapted itself to changed circumstances and turned from an almost medieval army into a recognisable early modern one.

He is nothing if not thorough, looking at all aspects of the army and the way it fought. After setting his context, he starts with examining the way it was administered and supplied, moves on to issues of command before looking at the common soldier, the way they were recruited, disciplined, fought and discharged, and how their morale was kept up. Finally, he looks at how the army waged war, the weaponry and tactics used, how the French army taught and practised field warfare as well as siege warfare, what he calls positional warfare, as it’s not just about sieges, but how fortresses can be used and countered to protect or invade a province or country.

Of each of these aspects he traces the way they evolved over the course of the grand siècle. His emphasis in tracing these developments is that the way in which army tactics or the command structure developed was a process of evolution rather than revolution, that these always involved compromises, were largely routed in older practises and always limited by what resources –men, food, money — were available or not, as the case might be. One consequence of the latter was that the supposedly absolutist rule of Louis XIV was in practise often compromised by the need to secure (monetary) support for the army, for example by having the aristocracy buy regiments then spent their own resources on their upkeep, or the fact that a large part of what the army consumed in food, ammunition, clothing etc had to be locally sourced rather than centrally provided, giving the provincial powers at least some measure of control too. On the whole therefore, while the army was much more the king’s army then it had been before Louis XIV, the French aristocracy still had its role to play.

Giant of the Grand Siècle is a complex, not always easy history to read through. For anybody interested in early modern military history it’s an interesting and illuminating book, of value even if you’re skeptical about some of Lynn’s theories, like this reviewer.

Singled Out — Virginia Nicholson

Published on January 2, 20122 Comments

Singled Out

Singled Out
Virginia Nicholson
312 pages including index
published in 2007

I found Singled Out in the Middelburg library and picked it up because it looked like the sort of book Sandra would’ve enjoyed reading. She had always been interested in social history, especially of Britain between the wars and of the role women played in these years. Sandra had actually been the one who first pointed out to me why there were so many spinsters in twenties and thirties detective stories, all those women living alone in bedsit rooms or sharing a cottage together. That was something I had noticed but assumed just to have been some sort of convention of the genre, rather than something real reflected in fiction.

But that was exactly what it was, as the interwar period was the period of the “Surplus Women”, two million women for whom there was no and would be no husbands, with the “flower of British manhood” cut down in the mud of Flanders. The First World War had left hundreds of thousands British men dead and many more crippled for life and a whole generation of women without enough husbands to go around. Granted, as the raw statistics prove this was not a new situation, as in Victorian times too this had been the case, but this was the first time this gender imbalance was both large and out in the open. This time it had hit the middle and upper classes disproportionally and therefore was widely commented on in the media and felt by those women themselves. What’s more, it came at a time of huge societal changes and anxiety and, as Nicholson shows, these socalled “surplus women” played a huge role in making British society more equal to women in general.

In Singled Out Virginia Nicholson attempts to tell the stories of this generation of women, who had all been brought up with the belief that the highest possible duty and happiness for a woman lay in marriage and motherhood, having to cope with a reality in which for them this was no longer possible and for some (many?) of them it was no longer as desirable either. The realities of the First World War, in which the absence of men had forced women into roles earlier denied them had given a great many young women a taste of greater freedom already. Now that two million of them were completely unable to fullfill their traditional roles, they had to find new meaning in their life, nor were they content to be pushed in the role of the traditional spinster as free caretaker for her sibling’s children or her aged parents. Instead they became business women, college students, artists, socialists or activists, forged new roles for themselves and the women coming after them.

Virginia Nicholson has taken great care to let these women talk for themselves as much as they can at this late stage. As Singled Out was published in 2007, a lot of the women of this generation were already dead, but she has managed to find quite a lot of first hand accounts nonetheless, by interviewing those women still alive, through tracking down memoirs and dairies, as well as contemporary documents: novels, essays and newspaper articles, even poetry. The stories that she tells this way are touching, often moving.

Especially the stories of those women who did leave a husband to be on the battlefield and had to deal with that grief for the rest of their lives. I’ve after all just lost Sandra myself and can understand what they were going through, even if my grief is different from theirs.

But these stories are also inspiring, as Nicholson shows how these women, had to deal not just with the loss of their men, but also with the expectations and disapproval of much of British society and the realities of being a single woman in a world where opportunities for single women were still few and far between and there was little help for them. Yet many of them still managed to find fullfilment in life through work, through political activism or even through taking care of other people’s babies. We’re all in their debt, because their efforts helped shape our modern world.

Medieval Warfare — Helen Nicholson

Published on December 29, 20111 Comment

Cover of Medieval Warfare

Medieval Warfare
Helen Nicholson
232 pages including index
published in 2004

Helen Nicholson’s Medieval Warfare is, as she puts it in her introduction, “intended to provide a point of entry tpo the subject of medieval warfare for students and others with an interest in the subject who are perplexed by the rapidly expanding body of scholarship in this area”. Which is just what I needed, as this is indeed a subject I’ve become interested in following on from my earlier readings in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Medieval Warfare is an ambitious book for trying to cover this whole period (300 to 1500 CE) even in overview in just 166 pages, excluding index. But Nicholson is a reader in history at Cardiff University who has written extensively on Medieval military matters and therefore is well suited to the task.

As any good historian should, she sets out how she will go about it in her preface. What she attempts to do is to look at the development of the main aspects of medieval warfare from just after the end of the (western) Roman Empire to the end of the Middle Ages, using concrete examples to illustrate these developments. She chose the period 300 to 1500 CE to emphasise the continuity between the military practises of the Late Roman Empire and the Middle Ages, with the latter date providing a convenient cutting off point between them and the Renaissance. The fourth century was chosen as a starting point because it was in the late fourth century that the Roman bureaucrat Vegetius wrote his manual on military strategy, a book that was hugely influential in European warfare until at least the sixteenth century. Geographically, Nicholson limits herself mostly to Europe, particularly France, Italy, England and Germany for her examples, though she does look to Eastern/Byzantine examples as well when appropriate.

After the introduction, Medieval Warfare starts with a chapter on the theory of warfare, followed by chapters on military personnel, buildings and equipment and finally one on the practise of warfare, with a smallish chapter on naval warfare tacked on at the very end. Each chapter is organised in a roughly chronological order, though several start with enumerations, as e.g. in the military buildings chapter first the various kinds of military buildings are briefly examined. Where necessary, Nicholson has also taken care to present the various parts of a given subject in a logical order, where e.g. the chapter on the practise of warfare has her first looking at the training of soldiers, troop manoeuvring, the actual battle, sieges and finally the aftermath of war.

The overall impression that you get from the development of the art of warfare in the Middle Ages was that it was largely evolutionary rather than revolutionary. After the collapse of the Roman political order war was effectively privatised, with professional warriors recruited for service by a warlord rather than trained by the government. As new states became stronger warfare became more centralised and professionalised again, but there wasn’t a real watershed moment. As Nicholson argues it is tempting to think about a warfare revolution in the last few centuries of the period, what with the development of larger standing professional armies, the switch from largely cavalry based armies to infantry based ones, not to mention guns and gunpowder, but in fact most of the fundamentals of warfare remained the same throughout the period.

As a primer to a huge subject Medieval Warfare was quite good, with one minor caveat, as there were no illustrations at all, which would’ve helped with some of the more technical bits.