Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/December 2022/Review essay

The study of military history involves reading books. Unlike some other fields, military history books are widely available and accessible to the general public. The purpose of this list, chosen by the Military history project coordinators, is to offer entry points into the study of military history that will sharpen and broaden the reader's knowledge of the field. Each coordinator has selected a few books or journal articles they consider are worthy of consideration, contemplation, and discussion.

This 2022 reading list follows on from the first such list published in The Bugle this time last year.

Selections by Gog the Mild
A fascinating overview of the roles climate change and pandemics may have played in the long drawn-out decay and fall of the Roman Empire. Without necessarily challenging established narratives, Harper provides a wider background dealing with the repeated natural shocks which slowly sapped the resilience of the Empire and drained its ability to continue to survive its frequent internal and external challenges.



Another masterclass in how to overthrow an established historiographical orthodoxy. The proposition that Edward III was a lucky bungler seems to have been little heard of late.


 * (Sample chapter.)

The Polish Military Institute of Armament Technology take a day off from HESH and Chobham to work on the penetrative effects of longbows on plate armour and chain mail. Digs into the detail of the details while somehow being fascinatingly readable. Left me thinking that I would rather be a Russian tank driver than a French knight at Crécy.



Selections by Hawkeye7
This fascinating book is actually the third in Corelli Barnett's Pride and Fall series in which he looks at the reasons behind the Britain's loss of great power status in the mid-20th century, but probably the one of most interest to the student of military history. It is generally agreed that Britain's decline was hastened if not caused by the attempts to retain great power status rather than accept it and chart an new course as a member of a European state. All that was wrong about Britain in the 1940s is meticulously charted. How and why things got that way remains more controversial. The catalogue of technical and social problems that afflicted wartime and post-war Britain had roots in the past, but that past was when the British Empire was at its zenith. Barnett was trying to explain the history behind UK's predicament in the 1980s, but many of the issues covered remain current today.

An account of British war production. The author sets out to demolish a series of myths. The first one is that old one about Britain fighting the war alone. The second is one about the government being removed from scientists and experts; the opposite was the case. The third, and most interesting, is the peculiar British interpretation of the war being one between machines. In some ways this became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The vision of a (relatively) cheap victory powered by machines did indeed become a reality in the final campaigns of the war, aided by vast support from the United States.

When it comes to the study of military logistics, a good textbook has been lacking. This book fills that need. It covers the field well, with examples that make abstract concepts clear and accessible to the reader. This book should be required reading at the staff college. It covers the science as well as the art, so there's some mathematical formulae, but nothing that would tax a high school kid. Logistics is not rocket science, it is just too often not done well.

Selections by Ian Rose
Most of the works I use for referencing articles are pretty specialised, but the following might have broader appeal. I've also picked them as being highly readable, the sort I look at out of sheer interest.

This cautionary tale focusses on the wartime rivalry between the RAAF's Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), George Jones, and his nominal subordinate Bill Bostock. When the CAS position was up for grabs in 1942, Bostock, the Deputy CAS, was the favoured candidate and Jones, Director of Training, the dark horse. But Bostock was enmeshed with the outgoing CAS, Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Burnett, RAF, and the pair had alienated the Federal Labor Government of the time. Jones got the job and Bostock was subsequently given RAAF Command, making him Australia's senior air operations officer in the Pacific. It should've been a perfect match... Jones, colourless and meticulous, was the ideal administrator; Bostock, tough and direct, was the obvious warfighter -- what's more, they'd been friends for years. Several things beyond Jones' surprise appointment conspired against them: Bostock answered to Lieutenant-General George Kenney of the US Fifth Air Force for operational tasking but to Jones for logistical support; neither Jones nor Bostock outranked the other, both being air vice-marshals; and there was no Australian chief of defence (as there is now) to mediate between the two. It still might've worked if they'd been of a mind to cooperate instead of compete, but they weren't. Kenney famously diarised that Jones and Bostock fought each other harder than they fought the Japanese -- and that said it all.

Of the plethora of books on the Battle of Britain, this one stands out for me and it inspired me to improve the article on Paterson Hughes to FA. Bungay seeks not simply to debunk legends as to uncover a true story just as interesting and just as heroic. He understands that myth is not untruth, but a way of explaining a "Big Fact". Because the battle was fought under Churchill, there's the assumption it would always have been fought, but Britain could have easily sued for a peace that didn't involve outright surrender and still left the Germans with a free hand in Europe. "There is no evidence at all", Bungay asserts, "that the British would not have followed Halifax had he made peace with Hitler". Bungay finds the battle more crucial for continental Europe than for Britain herself, as Germany knocking Britain out would have led either to continued Nazi domination of western Europe, or eventual Soviet domination. He also takes time to consider the part played by Bomber Command, not just the raids on Berlin that helped induce the Germans to switch to attacking London rather than British airfields, but the attacks on German airfields and French ports where the barges for the proposed Operation Sealion were being assembled. Finally, he displays a neat turn of phrase, describing one of Germany's challenges as Britain having "a dangerous talent for making friends and influencing people", and enjoys demolishing cliché-ridden accounts of the battle such as "While Britain and France had armies, navies and air forces, the Germans had a 'military machine' or 'juggernaut'.", and "Two German aircraft, the Ju 87 Stuka and the Messerschmitt Bf 110 long-range fighter, are always 'much vaunted'. The OED describes the verb 'vaunt', meaning 'to boast or brag', as rhetorical and archaic. I am not aware of having heard or read this word in any other context."



Although I don't write on US politics, it's always been an interest of mine and given the part played by this pair in the Cold War, I think it does come under our purview. When I picked this up soon after its publication, I was surprised there weren't more Kennedy-Nixon parallel lives studies out there. I figured it was partly because Nixon outlived Kennedy by such a long margin. Matthews emphasises that despite this, the ghost of Kennedy haunted Nixon for the rest of his political life. Like Jones and Bostock, Kennedy and Nixon were friends before they became bitter rivals. Both were mavericks in their own ways -- rich kid Kennedy had little time for the liberal establishment, and poor boy Nixon never felt part of the monied class of his own party. Kennedy claimed he'd vote for Nixon if the Democrats didn't nominate him in 1960; Nixon loved the Cold War rhetoric of Kennedy's inaugural address. Each was capable of employing power for unscrupulous ends -- Kennedy taped White House conversations and used the IRS to go after opponents before Nixon, but Nixon made more of a habit of it and was the one who got caught. Matthews contends that Kennedy's spectre drove Nixon all the way to Watergate, the fear of a Teddy Kennedy challenge leading to the Republicans' campaign of break-ins and bugging; he also finds that Ted Kennedy's power in the Senate allowed him to orchestrate the investigation in such a way as to practically bait Nixon into ordering the Saturday Night Massacre. With a touch of the poet, Matthews sums up by saying that "If Americans viewed John F. Kennedy as their shining hero, they also recognized the five o'clock shadow of Richard Nixon in the fluorescent light of their bathroom mirror."



Selections by Nick-D
I found the following works to be particularly useful in my editing this year.

The literature on the Australian Army's armoured force is surprisingly thin - we get book after book on the SAS and to a lesser extent regular infantry, but there's not much on the other branches of the service. As a result, this book fills an important gap and does so well. It provides good detail on the RAAC's structure, equipment and deployments, and includes some useful analysis. It's also well illustrated. An updated book on this topic would be invaluable.



There's a fairly large literature on the Rhodesian military during the Rhodesian Bush War, but most of it is offensively bad (these works are commonly some or all of biased, racist, poorly researched and/or badly written). This book represents the culmination of the academic Luise White's years of research on the topic, and is excellent. While focused on post-war portrayals of the Rhodesian military, it covers an impressively varied range of topics and includes lots of details on the military's structure and culture (the chapter on how conscription was applied is particularly fascinating and is an excellent case study of why Rhodesia was always doomed). The book is well researched and written, and provides very sharp analysis of why Rhodesia lost its war. The discussion of why this mediocre military of a white supremacist state continues to be lionised by analysts who should know better and a range of political extremists is also useful.



This book provides excellent analysis of the use of French ports by the German Navy during World War II. This is an important and under-researched topic, as these ports were the navy's main bases during the Battle of the Atlantic. Hellwinkel demonstrates that the huge efforts the navy put into developing the ports as bases for its capital ships were totally nuts: all that was achieved was bringing the warships within easy range of British bombers. The submarine bases were much more successful, but suffered from difficulties in sourcing workers, especially as the war continued. This is an essential work for articles on the Battle of the Atlantic and deserves to be better known.