Year after year, authors and publishers produce a steady stream of books about wars past, present, and to come. Last year that stream flowed as far back as the early days of the Roman Empire; it reached near flood level when it came to the dangerous days of the 20th and 21st centuries. The cumulative effect of all the histories, all the scholarly studies, all the persistent conspiracy theories, and all the high-decibel political tirades serves as a welcome reminder that more has changed with the years than the astonishing technologies of new weapons. Despite the old canard that generals always plan to fight the last war, today's commanders must plan to take up arms against enemies once thought not worth worrying about, people whose motives we do not really understand, in areas we know about largely from satellite cameras. Although much is new in the profession of arms, past battles and past predictions remain rich sources of interest (and argument) for contemporary readers.
In The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, Max Boot, a writer for The Wall Street Journal, insists there is much to be learned from the past, even from tactics devised by the U.S. Marine Corps for early 20th-century skirmishes in the Caribbean and the jungles of Central America. The Corps' Small Wars Manual, Boot says, remains "an unparalleled exposition of the theory of small wars." Washington hawks (both military and political), bolstered by wishful-thinking troopers of the think-tank brigades, talk of quick, surgical strikes made possible by "smart" weapons that are the products of modern technology. But they tend to underestimate the cost in lives and money. "To really see what lies in store for the armed forces in the future," argues Boot, "you could do worse than to cast your gaze back to the past."
Naval leaders will find a virtual library of information about ships and sea battles across the centuries in the three hefty volumes of Naval Warfare: An International Encyclopedia. Although most of the more than 1,500 entries relate to the British and U.S. navies of the oceanic age, the rest of the seagoing world is not ignored. From Australia to the Confederate States of America, from the Ottoman Empire to Venice and the Republic of Texas, at least 15 other countries, past and present, are represented. Individual ships, battles, and campaigns are covered, along with tactics, training, communications, and amphibious warfare. The wide range of topics is impressive. Biographical entries, said naval historian Jack Sweetman in his review, "extend beyond commanders to include policy makers, publicists, naval architects, inventors and innovators, strategic thinkers and analysts." A reader might quibble about certain omissions or perceived errors, but "no naval reference collection, public or private, should be without a copy."
These days, new reports of World War I actions may be rare in publishers' catalogs, but there still are names and events from that half-forgotten era that can stir a historian's interest. The sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania off Kinsale on Ireland's southern coast was a disaster waiting to happen. And when the great ship was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat with the loss of 1,201 passengers and crew, the disaster eventually helped propel a reluctant United States into the war. In Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy, author Diana Preston does far more than recall the event. In his review, James P. Delgado, director of the Vancouver Maritime Museum in British Columbia, pointed out that Preston "takes readers on a wide-ranging tour of larger themes such as German and British relations, the rise of the naval arms race, the development of the ocean liner, and the development of the submarine and torpedo." The product of the author's prodigious research, said Delgado, is "some of the best narrative history to emerge in a long time."
The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek tells the story of an extraordinary man. Pytheas was said to have written a book about his picaresque adventures in the fourth century, B.C., but no copy of his On the Ocean exists. Archaeology professor Barry Cunliffe had to reconstruct Pytheas's travels from secondhand accounts by Greek and Roman historians. Diodorus, Siculus, Aristotle, and Pliny the Elder all took note of Pytheas's cruise from Massalia (Marseilles) past the northern fringes of Europe and on to the limits of the known world of his time. As he followed in Pytheas's wake, Professor Cunliffe took what amounted to a self-taught course in "early navigation, Greek astronomy, tin mining, origin myths, and primeval amber-producing forests"—the products that Pytheas was searching for and the tactics he used to find them. With singular skill, the professor brings Pytheas to life, although the author is disappointed that he could not discover what happened to the wandering Greek after he returned to Massalia. "One's imagination, unrestrained by scraps of history and archaeology, can take full rein."
Much more of the world than was known to Pythias was familiar to the great navigators of the late 18th century. Arguments about whether Royal Navy Captain James Cook was first to visit the lands he "discovered" in the 1770s still linger more than three centuries later, but there is no argument about Cook's accomplishments. In Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tony Horwitz recounts his own voyage in a replica of the Endeavor, the ship Cook first sailed to the Pacific. No mere travelogue, Horwitz's book details Cook's circumnavigation of the globe along with his visits to Australia and New Zealand, the Arctic and Antarctic, Alaska and Russia. On all three of his voyages Cook's success as a cartographer was matched by his skills as a master of men at sea. "At a time when long sea voyages could mean the death of half the crew because of poor diet and crude, unsanitary conditions," said reviewer John Carey, "Cook's record of successful missions with little or no loss of life is remarkable."
Reading about Captain Cook and the other great navigators of his day may seem like a trip back to a high-school geography class. In Brown-, Green-, and Blue-Water Fleets: The Influence of Geography on Naval Warfare, 1861 to the Present , two college professors, Michael Lindberg and Daniel Todd, explain that the subject is far more complex than "where something, someone, or someplace is located." Even as the authors narrow their focus to concentrate on geography's influence on the world's navies, the subject expands. Economics, politics, populations, and natural resources all become involved. New trends in naval architecture and armaments are examined along with the effect of geography on past sea battles, as well as on riverine and littoral engagements. "When it comes to the ships, weapons, tactics, and strategies involved," say Lindberg and Todd, "change has been, and probably will continue to be, a constant companion to navies." And the impact of geography will continue to be a constant element in that change.
During the Vietnam War, the geography of that troubled country—particularly its dense jungles and moist, debilitating climate—had a profound effect, not only on the tactics used but also on the troops involved. Some who survived came home apparently unchanged by their terrible experience; most carried physical or mental scars that have been slow to heal. In The Cat from Hue: A Vietnam War Story, veteran CBS correspondent John Laurence, who saw more combat than most of the men he interviewed, tells the story of his own psychic wounds. Like so many others, he came to the war believing "the cause was honorable, and that the result would be successful." By the time of the 1968 Tet offensive he had changed his mind. The war had gone bad, but even so there were compensations. There was "the intense wartime love among friends, families, and even strangers who found themselves in distress together." There was the pride of being among courageous men who were "doing good together." There was also Meo, a stray cat Laurence adopted during a firefight in Hue. That cat, said Vietnam veteran Jeffrey Record in his review, "epitomized the communist enemy the United States foolishly took on in Vietnam: fierce, stubborn, and above all, a survivor." While he was "in country," the author became addicted to the thrill of battlefield danger. Once home he turned instead to drugs and alcohol. Any reader of his magnificent book surely will join Record in hoping that with Meo's help John Laurence has "exorcised his personal war demons."
Others among Vietnam's walking wounded, men who came home suffering from varying degrees of post traumatic stress disorder, had no friend like Meo to help them. But a fortunate few have had the benefit of treatment by Dr. Jonathan Shay. A classics scholar as well as a Department of Veterans Affairs psychiatrist, Dr. Shay found striking similarities between the problems that bedeviled his disturbed patients and Homer's description of Odysseus's troubles during his long voyage home from Troy to Ithaca. "While Homer has little to contribute to our understanding of modern military training," says Dr. Shay in his Odysseus in America, "the poet is brilliant on the subject of military cohesion." Homer understood the troubles Odysseus met when he came home alone to confront a neighborhood of strangers. Had he known of the so-called military efficiency experts who sent replacements to Vietnam fighting units one or two at a time, the Greek bard would have erupted in scorn. Unit cohesion, both the doctor and Homer argue, is vital. Returning veterans would have had less difficulty adapting to the sudden strangeness of home if they had trained together, gone to war together, and returned together.
The familiar adage is largely correct: wartime history is written by the victors. But time passes, once secret archives are opened to historians, and past events are examined from a new angle. Reluctant Allies: German-Japanese Naval Relations in World War II, by Hans Joachim Krug, Yoichi Hirama, Berthold J. Sander-Nagashima, and Axel Niestle, offers a rare look at World War II in the Pacific from the losers' side. The four researchers who collaborated on this book dug up fascinating anecdotes, not the least of which was the devastating delay in delivery of captured intelligence summaries to Japanese fleet commanders. Had the Japanese learned in time that the Allies had broken their codes and knew their plans, orders to the Imperial Fleet bound for Midway might well have been changed. This scholarly study also examines the often-contentious relationship between the Japanese Army and Navy that hampered their war effort. Hitler's fear of an Asian "Yellow Peril" was another roadblock. German and Japanese efforts to learn from each other's engineering techniques and naval armament were severely compromised. Future historians also will find the voluminous appendices and notes that fill a third of this book of inestimable value.
As a Western historian, Mark R. Peattie ran into significant problems as he did his research for Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941. He had to struggle with the ambiguities of the Japanese language and the reluctance of many World War II survivors to discuss their defeat, and work around lost or destroyed documents. This encyclopedic study is proof of his success. It demonstrates how much Japanese aviation in its early days depended on British and American designers. Later, it was British and French technicians and tacticians who helped get Japanese naval aviation ready for takeoff. By the time Japan was ready for World War II, its Navy's designers and engineers were building some excellent planes, and competent pilots were being trained. Then plans for a short war went awry. Before it went down in flames, Peattie says, "the country's naval air service was outproduced, outorganized, outmanned, and outfought."
Having already produced a book comprised of interviews with infantrymen who fought in Europe during World War II, Patrick K. O'Donnell looked across half the world to the islands of the Pacific. There, the war, he says in Into the Rising Sun, "does not parallel the war in Europe. . . . Many factors contributed to making it perhaps the most savage and brutal theater in World War II." O'Donnell concentrates on what Marine General Carl Mundy called in his review "the elite infantry," Marine Raiders and paratroopers, "Merrill's Marauders," and Army Rangers and paratroopers. Those were the outfits that had the toughest training and experienced some of the hardest-fought battles. The author provides proper context—brief unit histories and short reviews of specific battles—but his main focus is on the oral histories provided by individuals. "This is not a book for those with weak stomachs," said General Mundy. "It is not politically correct, and it will not leave the reader feeling good. It is about the inhumanity and deprivation of infantry combat. It is worth reading because of the reality it brings to war through the voices of those who experienced it, and because it is important to succeeding generations to know what they did."
For good or ill, civilian authorities who direct a war from far behind the lines may have as much effect on the outcome as the people who actually fight it. In Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime, Eliot Cohen, director of strategic studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, makes a commendable effort to "uncover the nature of strategy making in war." As a leading defense intellectual, it is no surprise that Cohen builds a strong case for active, rather than passive, civilian leadership. He concentrates on four men: U.S. President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, French Prime Minister Georges Clemencau during World War I, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during World War II, and Israeli leader David Ben Gurion during Israel's War of Independence. Each of these men, said Army Lieutenant Colonel H. R. McMaster in his review, "was inquisitive and interested in the details of strategy, logistics, and operations. They knew what questions to ask because they possessed common sense, sound judgment, and a degree of intellectual curiosity that spurred serious study of war. . . . They were excellent judges of character who understood the capabilities and limitations of their advisors," qualities too often lacking in contemporary leaders.
One quality few, if any, leaders lack is a knowledge of their own importance, their country's need of their own survival. In the overheated days of the Cold War, when a nuclear attack on the United States seemed not only possible but probable, the government produced an Emergency Plans Book. Long kept secret, those plans were declassified in 1998. They were quickly reclassified, but not before they were photocopied by historian L. Douglas Keeney and turned into a book with the help of nuclear expert Stephen Schwartz. The Doomsday Scenario: The Official Doomsday Scenario Written by the United States Government during the Cold War took on a frightening new life with the events of 11 September. Government officials and legislators were hurried off to supposedly bomb-proof shelters. As coauthor, Schwartz points out, it may be comforting that facilities recently deemed irrelevant were suddenly put to use. But "with so much attention and money devoted to safeguarding government leaders . . . would there be anyone or anything left to govern in the event of a truly catastrophic attack?" After all, a nuclear exchange would leave winner and loser alike glowing in the dark.
Colonel Seamon writes “Books of Interest” for Proceedings and is a former assistant managing editor for TIME.
The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power
Max Boot. New York: Basic Books, 2002. 428 pp. Photos. Notes. Bib. Index. $30.00.
Naval Warfare: An International Encyclopedia
Spencer C. Tucker, ed. 3 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2002. 1,231 pp. Maps. Illus. Gloss. Bib. Index. $295.00.
Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy
Diana Preston. New York: Walker & Co., 2002. 532 pp. Illus. Notes. Bib. Index. $28.00.
The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek
Barry Cuncliffe. New York: Walker & Co., 2002. 179 pp. Photos. Maps. Index. $24.00.
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before
Tony Horwitz. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2002. 480 pp. Photos. Maps. Bib. Index. $26.00.
Brown-, Green-, and Blue-Water Fleets: The Influence of Geography on Naval Warfare, 1861 to the Present
Michael Lindberg and Daniel Todd. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. 242 pp. Maps. Bib. Index. $62.00.
The Cat from Hue: A Vietnam War Story
John Laurence. New York: Public Affairs, 2002. 850 pp. Maps. Index. $30.00.
Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming
Jonathan Shay. New York: Scribner, 2002. 329 pp. Appendices. Notes. Bib. Index. $25.00.
Reluctant Allies: German-Japanese Naval Relations in World War II
Hans Joachim-Krug, Yoichi Hirama, Berthold J. Sander-Nagashima, and Axel Niestle. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002. 365 pp. Photos. Appendices. Notes. Gloss. Bib. Index. $38.95 ($31.16).
Sunburst: The Rise of Japanese Naval Air Power, 1909-1941
Mark R. Peattie. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2002. 364 pp. Photos. Drawings. Maps. Appendices. Bib. Notes. Index. $36.95 ($25.87).
Into the Rising Sun
Patrick K. O'Donnell. New York: Free Press, 2002. 384 pp. Illus. Index. $27.00.
Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime
Eliot A. Cohen. New York: Free Press, 2002. 288 pp. Notes. Index. $25.00.
The Doomsday Scenario: The Official Doomsday Scenario Written by the United States Government during the Cold War
L. Douglas Keeney and Stephen Schwartz. St. Paul, MN: MBI Publishing, 2002. 126 pp. Photos. $19.95.