Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (Review)

Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (review)
Gunther Erich Rothenberg
The Journal of Military History, Volume 68, Number 3, July 2004, pp. 943-945
(Review)
Published by Society for Military History

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/jmh.2004.0142
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/170625
[ Access provided at 2 Nov 2021 23:08 GMT from JHU Libraries ]

Book Reviews
✩
Bruce Vandervort, Editor

Virginia Military Institute
Battle: A History of Combat and Culture. By John A. Lynn. Boulder, Colo.:

Westview Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8133-3371-7. Photographs. Illustrations.
Tables. Appendix. Notes. Index. Pp. xxv, 399. $27.50.
Some seven years ago in this journal, John Lynn, a prominent specialist
on French military affairs from the Age of Louis XIV to Napoleon, expressed
his fears that an “embattled academic military history” was becoming
increasingly isolated and in danger of becoming extinct. He recommended
employing the “new” cultural history approach to explore connections
between the evolution of society and war. Of course, fears about the demise
of military history were somewhat premature and except for purely opera-
tional history, a field hardly ever taught in the academy, most course work
in military history already included substantial social-political and cultural
components.
Since then John Keegan in his A History of Warfare (1993) and Victor
Davis Hanson’s recent Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise
of Western Power (2001) have tried to establish the evolution of a specific
culturally determined western way of war. Originating from the Greek
hoplite battle, the western way, they maintain, has remained basically dif-
ferent from non-western approaches to fighting. Lynn’s Battle does not agree
with either of these two authors. As described in a special appendix, its
methodology is based on the interaction between an idealized conduct of
war and the realities of combat, influenced and limited by political and social
circumstances and dominant intellectual patterns. Lynn rejects the common
belief that warfare responds only to the universal demands of tactics and
technology. Instead, he asserts that the ideas and ideals of different cultures
influenced the way they have fought. He borrows, he claims, from the
methodology of cultural history “without being guilty of its excesses” (p.
xix). Indeed, Battle is rarely burdened by theory or jargon, but this raises the
question why the introduction of cultural history terminology was necessary
at all in an intelligent, broad, well-informed, challenging, and frequently
provocative study.
MILITARY HISTORY ★ 943

Book Reviews
Spanning three continents and with a time frame from Ancient Greece
to the present, the book is organized into eight self-sustaining case studies.
The first, “Written in Blood: The Classical Greek Drama of Battle and the
Western Way of War,” expounds differences with Hanson and to a lesser
degree with Keegan. Lynn denies Hanson’s basic thesis that a continuous and
superior Western Way of War, “civic militarism” as he calls it, based on dis-
cipline and law, has provided the foundations enabling western armies to
overcome larger and sophisticated non-western forces. Pointing to major
gaps and deviations from this theory, Lynn refutes the idea of an innate cul-
tural western superiority. His second chapter, “Subtleties of Violence” dis-
misses the concept of a specific “Oriental Way of War.” His discussion of the
ancient military writings of China and India notes that though mass armies
were not unknown, these cultures rejected the bloody slogging of western
armies in favor of a more sophisticated indirect approach, attrition and strat-
agems. In addition, in these two, as well as the following chapters, Lynn
clearly wants to make the case that the “universal soldier” shaped by war
and combat, a staple concept for many writers, never existed. Lynn argues
that the values and assumptions of soldiers from different cultures differed
and continue to differ from each other in fundamental ways, an assumption
not shared by the reviewer.
Chapter 3, “Chivalry and Chevauchée,” is an exposition of the contrast
between the ideals of chivalry and the brutal reality of medieval war, espe-
cially the merciless raids devastating the countryside. The next chapter,
“Linear Warfare: Images and Ideas of Combat in the Age of the Enlighten-
ment,” the era of the author’s recognized expertise, suggests that the para-
meters of limited war were, at least in western Europe, conceptual rather
than imposed by resource limitation. Again, keeping in mind central and
Eastern Europe, the reviewer dissents. But he liked Chapter 5, dealing with
the influence of European military practices in India, successfully amalga-
mating concepts of class and caste with the regimental system to form effec-
tive fighting forces. Chapter 6, “The Sun of Austerlitz: Romantic Visions of
Decisive Battle in Nineteenth Century Europe,” describes how civic mili-
tarism, the “people in arms,” saved the French republic to become in
Napoleon’s hands a temporarily unbeatable combat instrument. Of course,
civic militarism could be turned against Napoleon and lead to his overthrow,
but when conscription was adopted by all European states the mass slaugh-
ter of World War I became unavoidable. Relying for much of his interpreta-
tion on Peter Paret and Azar Gat, Lynn indicates that he believes that
Clausewitz’s interpretation of the Napoleonic conflicts bore some responsi-
bility for this outcome, but also points out that, ironically, in the aftermath
of Vietnam, Clausewitz became core reading in all U.S. service schools.
The final two chapters are illuminating. In Chapter 7, “The Merciless
Fight. Race and Military Culture in the Pacific War,” Lynn describes the vast
gulf separating the U.S. and Japanese soldiers and marines, one stressing
survival and the other deliberate and glorious death. However, Lynn cor-
rectly refutes the allegations made by John W. Dower that this was above all
944 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

Book Reviews
an ever more total race war and he concludes that the decision to drop the
atomic weapon at Hiroshima was made for operational and not racial rea-
sons. In the last chapter, “Crossing the Canal: Egyptian Effectiveness and
Military Culture in the October War,” Lynn, basing himself on work by Ken-
neth M. Pollack, regards the shortcomings and successes displayed by the
Arab militaries in their wars against Israel as resulting from the rigid struc-
ture of Arab societies.
The book closes with an “Epilogue: Terrorism and Evil’’ in which the
author explains that the fight against this threat will require a new approach.
He briefly considers the nature of terrorism, the war of the weak or a crim-
inal act, requiring new tactical, operational and cultural responses.
Gunther E. Rothenberg Australian Defence Force Academy

Canberra, ACT, Australia
Ground Warfare: An International Encyclopedia. Three volumes. Edited

by Stanley Sandler. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2002. ISBN 1-57607-
344-0. Maps. Photographs. Illustrations. Glossary. Selected bibliography.
Index. Pp. xxxviii, 1065. $295.00.
To distinguish itself from general encyclopedias of military history, a
work entitled Ground Warfare: An International Encyclopedia should pro-
vide readers with articles focused on aspects of ground warfare from across
human history. The promise of the title is only partly fulfilled: while these
three volumes do range beyond the western military experience, they do not
provide a level of detail on aspects of ground warfare above that found in
general encyclopedias of military history.
The attention to key topics in the history of ground warfare is disap-
pointing. A three-volume work should have an article of more than twelve
paragraphs on “Infantry” or sixteen paragraphs on “Artillery.” The article on
“Nuclear and Atomic Weapons” spends most of its length discussing the
development of these weapons and their strategic implications, but does not
discuss at all how armies changed their doctrine and equipment to adapt to
these new weapons. To summarize the evolution of tactics and weapons in
World War I by stating parenthetically “the German High Command seemed
to be the only belligerents to have learned anything from the deadlock of
trench warfare” (p. 963) is to leave readers far behind the current scholar-
ship on this topic. There is no article on that most important topic of ground
warfare, combat motivation. There also is no article on the lesser but still
important topic of ground air defense.
Some editorial choices are inexplicable: there is an article on Meri-
wether Lewis, but not one on S. L. A. Marshall. Some editorial choices would
have been better suited to a work of general military history: there is an arti-
cle on the atomic bombing of Japan, but not one on the U.S. Army’s Pen-
tomic Era. Some editorial choices are debatable: there is an article on Gen.
MILITARY HISTORY ★ 945

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Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (review)

Gunther Erich Rothenberg

Published by Society for Military History

For additional information about this article

[ Access provided at 2 Nov 2021 23:08 GMT from JHU Libraries ]

Bruce Vandervort, Editor

Battle: A History of Combat and Culture. By John A. Lynn. Boulder, Colo.:

MILITARY HISTORY ★ 943

944 ★ THE JOURNAL OF

Gunther E. Rothenberg Australian Defence Force Academy

Ground Warfare: An International Encyclopedia. Three volumes. Edited

MILITARY HISTORY ★ 945

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