History

African Trilogy — Alan Moorehead

Published on February 5, 2012Leave a comment

cover of African Trilogy

Mediterranean Front, A Year of Battle, The End in Africa
Alan Moorehead
642 pages including index
published in 1941, 1943,1943, compilation 1945

If journalism is history as first draft, then these three books, Mediterranean Front, A Year of Battle, The End in Africa; published in one volume as African Trilogy are history as second draft. Written while the Second World War was still ongoing, each of these books tell the story of one year of war in the desert, as seen by one of the preeminent war correspondents of the era. Written largely without the benefit of hindsight, from the notes that Moorehead took at the time, these three books together not only provide an interesting look at an important period in World War II, which England largely had to fight on its own, but also at how people at the time thought about the war, when the outcome was by no means certain yet.

If you’ve heard of Alan Moorehead, it’s probably for his post-war books on the exploration of the Nile, The White Nile (1960) and The Blue Nile (1962). During the Second World War he was a correspondent for the Daily Express, following the war in North Africa, the invasion of Sicily and the war in Italy. As becomes clear from reading these three volumes, Moorehead wasn’t one of those journalists content to stay at headquarters, but went chasing down the front whenever he could. Some of the incidents here certainly read like Boy’s Own Adventures stuff, several times barely escaping running into the enemy at several moments. Moorehead is a born raconteur, aimable, slightly understated, though with some of the attitudes and language use of the time that might seem strange to modern readers.

Mediterranean Front is the story of the first year of war in the desert, from 1940 to 1941, at time when the UK stood alone against Germany, and in the Middle East, Italy. Italy had only declared war on England in June of 1940, had overwhelming numerical superiority over the British and Commonwealth forces and was poised to overrun not just Egypt from Libya, but also much of the British Empire in East Africa from Italian Somalia and Ethiopia. For obvious reasons, there wasn’t much chance of reinforcement from home, nor was the equipment available first rate. Despite this, never in Moorehead’s account do you get a feeling of despair or that the troops were particularly worried. Concerned yes and the commanders certainly were aware of their limitations, but they come over as determined to overcome these without being reckless.

In that first year of battle the see-saw nature of war in the Western Desert already is clear. The Italians are the first to go on the offensive, get into Egypt but can’t go further, a smart counteroffensive by Wavell manages not only to get them out of Egypt, but overruns most of Italian Libya, but in turn can’t quite get to Tripoli. This gave the Germans the chance to come to the aid of their allies and in turn they drove back the British and Commenwealth forces. This pattern would last throughout the war in the desert, up until the Allied landings in French North Africa broke the deadlock.

In that first year of battle the British had more to deal with than just the Western Desert. There’s the struggle in East Africa, the British occupation of French ruled Syria that concludes the first volume, a pro-Axis coup in Iraq and most importantly, the British expedition to support Greece in its defence against the Italians, which goes disastrously wrong. Moorehead is there for most of these secondary campaigns, following them for longer or shorter times, making an effort to show how they influenced the main effort in Libya and Egypt.

But he always returns to the Western Desert, as in the second volume, a Year of Battle, which starts with the joint British-Russian takeover of Persia/Iran, which Moorehead witnesses from nearby. The struggle in the second year of desert warfare is simpler, as with the British failure in Greece and success in East Africa, Syria and Persia only the Western Desert remains as an active theatre. This time it’s the British who have the succesful offensive only to run out of steam and the Africa Korps who manages to successfully counter and overrun almost all British defences, including Tobruk. Again, despite the seriousness of the situation Moorehead shows no despair on the side of the British, though there is panic as the Germans seem poised to take Alexandria and Cairo. Since this book too was published during the war, you do wonder briefly how much here has been (self) censored, but Moorehead seems remarkably honest about the mistakes and faults of the British and their commanders.

Moorehead is no longer in the desert at the start of the third book, having left the Middle East behind for some assignments in America, missing the start of the invasion but making use of this to sail to Africa with an escort to a convoy. Once in Africa, he has to split his time between the First Army moving up from North Africa into Tunesia and the Eight Army doing the same from Egypt. He does this well, slighting neither even if the Eight is still his favourite.

The three books of the African Trilogy obviously do not tell the whole story of this part of World War II, but it’s as close a look at it as you can get from any historian. Moorehead was often close to the battles he writes about and it shows.

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.