Warfare and military history

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.

Air Power and Maneuver Warfare — Martin van Creveld et all

Published on January 2, 20121 Comment

Air Power and Maneuver Warfare

Air Power and Maneuver Warfare
Martin van Creveld, Steve Canby & Ken Brower
268 pages including index
published in 1994

Air Power and Maneuver Warfare is a strange book. At first it seems to be just a theoretical and historical overview of how air power and maneuver warfare fit together, but something seemed off from the start. This book was commissioned by the US Airforce’s Air War College just after the Cold War had ended and more importantly, the US military establishment finally started to be convinced of this. It’s a political document as much as a theoretical one, written for an audience that’s supposed to be familiar with the theory of “maneuver warfare” (sic) but who do needed to be convinced of the argument Creveld and his co-authors are putting forward.

Said argument seems to be that the US Army needs to move away from its historical attrition warfare, linear orientation towards a more flexible maneuver orientated attitude, to be better able to deal with the challenges a post-Cold War world will throw at it. Meanwhile the airforces also need to shift towards a more tactical support role for the army rather than being obsessed with strategic air warfae and air defence suppression. This latter is not a new criticism of course, as ever since the USAF became a seperate arm of the armed forces it has been accused of neglecting tactical air support. The irony of it all is that while van Creveld and his co-authors (politely) argue that the then current strategic orientation of the US Armed Forces is outdated and inadequate to deal with the complexities of a post-Cold War world, their own recommendations are just as much a product of Cold War thinking, assuming that potential opponents will need to be and can be defeated by conventional military operations.

The reality of the last two decades has for the most part put the lie to this assumption, with the sole exception of the opening phase of the War on Iraq. Most conflicts the US has involved itself in have been limited conflict, fighting guerilla forces rather than conventional armies and where the sort of strategic air support van Creveld et all were denouncing has been rather important for the success of these operations. Some lip service is given in the introduction to this sort of warfare, but on the whole the book only talks about traditional warfare.

Which is probably not that surprising, written as it has been between the succesful conclusion of the First Gulf War and the US marine landings in Somalia, before things went sour there. The Gulf War was the final hurrah of the Cold War US Army, a vindication of their training, equipment and tactics; it was not quite the war it was taught to fight, but it was the type of war it was taught to fight. It’s in that context that Air Power and Maneuver Warfare was written, which explains its emphasis on conventional warfare rather than the kind of operations the US army would fight in reality. It’s also written without the benefit of access to Soviet archives that later historians/military theorists would’ve have, so misestimates a lot of the Soviet experiences in World War Two, as well as during the Cold War, still holding the conventional view that in a conventional war in Germany NATO would’ve been toast against the Warsaw Pact.

Air Power and Maneuver Warfare starts with a short overview of the theory of maneuver warfare in the first chapter, from its inception in the campaigns of Napoleon through the refinements theorists like von Clausewitz put it thorugh. The next three chapters then looks at the historical examples of the German Blitzkrieg campaigns in WWII and the Soviet response later in the war, together with the Israeli experiences in 1967 and 1973 to see how air power has been used and should be used in maneuver warfare. The concluding chapter than takes the conclusions reached and applies them to the US Army in the nineties and how it should re-organise itself, before looking in an appendix at how the just concluded Gulf War measured up. Finally, in a seperate part of the book, the Air War College responds to van Creveld and his co-authors, criticising their critique. This part is not fully integrated in the rest of the book and though it has its points (frex, in how van Creveld ignores the political context in which the Gulf War took place and how this impacts strategy) but is too short and sketchy to convince.

In short, this was a propaganda attempt that didn’t quite convince, largely due to van Creveld’s own blindspots. Hindsight is 20/20, but even at the time it should’ve been clear that the military context the book was written for no longer existed.

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.

Omaha Beach: a Flawed Victory – Adrian R. Lewis

Published on November 5, 2010

Omaha Beach: a Flawed Victory

Omaha Beach: a Flawed Victory
Adrian R. Lewis
381 pages including index and notes
published in 2001

Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory was not quite the book I expected it to be or wanted to read. What I thought I was getting out of the library was a book describing the landings itself, looking in detail at how the battle for Omaha Beach evolved, similar to a book on Kursk I got at the same time. What I got instead was an analysis of the strategic choices made for the landings and how that led to near-disaster at Omaha. The actual battle is dealt with in the first chapter, the rest of the book deals with the reasons why the battle happened as it did.

Any disappointment I felt was shortlived. The book I got was easily as interesting as the book I wanted to get. What it managed to do was to make me question the “official” reasons why the Americans at Omaha Beach did so much worse than their colleagues at Utah or the British/Commonwealth forces at their landings. What I’ve always read was that the American commanders at Omaha had both underestimated the German resistance and the German fortification and had rejected the use of all the various special enginering tanks the British had developed to tackle these fortifications, the socalled “Hobart’s Funnies“. What Adrian R. Lewis argues instead was that the real problem was that the Normandy Landings were planned according to the wrong doctrine, that the experience build up in earlier landings in the Pacific and the Mediterranean was ignored in favour of finding new solutions to the same problems because the commanders in charge of Operation Overlord overestimated the uniqueness of the operation.

The Battle of Kursk – David M. Glantz & Jonathan M. House

Published on August 8, 2010

The Battle of Kursk

The Battle of Kursk
David M. Glantz & Jonathan M. House
472 pages including index and notes
published in 1999

Kursk is a name most people probably only know from that Russian submarine that sank some years ago. Much fewer people know what that submarine was named after: one of the bloodiest and most important battles of World War II. The Battle of Kursk was fought in 1943, the largest tank battle of the war and was the last battle in which the Germans had the strategic initiative. After Kursk it was the Russians who held the upper hand and the Germans who had to defend. What’s more it was the first battle in which the Russian forces managed to stop the German blitzkrieg
It’s also a battle loved by war nerds, as it got the German panzer army at its peak taking on endless waves of Russian T-34s and Su-76s on the endless steppes and is so much more interesting than the infantry slog of Stalingrad…

However much of what we used to know about Kursk has come from German sources, as Soviet archives have only come available since the end of the USSR. So it has always been about the heroic deeds of the panzer commanders against the endless Slavic hordes so to speak. The emphasis has largely been on the Germans plans for the battle, on what went wrong for them and especially in the memoirs of those particpated, how it was not their fault that the battle was lost but Hitler’s. The Battle of Kursk is one of the first books on the battle to make full use of Soviet archives as well as German ones, giving a much more complete picture of the battle.