
John Shy |
The 2008 George C. Marshall
Lecture in Military History: "History, and the History of
War" |
John Shy is Professor Emeritus of History at the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. After graduate study at the
University of Vermont (M.A.) and Princeton University (Ph.D.), he
taught at Princeton before joining the Michigan faculty in 1968. His
published works include A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections
on the Military Struggle for American Independence (1976;
revised ed. 1990) and "Jomini" in Makers of Modern Strategy
(1986). The lecture was delivered on 5 January 2008 at the American
Historical Association meeting in Washington, D.C. and first
published in the Journal of Military History 72 (2008)
1033-46. It is reproduced here by the kind permission of the Society
for Military History.

Abstract
Studies of war published in the last twenty years by distinguished
historians who are not military specialists represent a call to
military historians to engage these studies on the common ground of
war itself, in effect working to bridge the gulf that has kept
military historians on the margins of the historical profession.
None of these studies is flawless, but at the same time their great
value calls for constructive help from military historians who study
the same wars, and who can build on these works to achieve more
satisfactory syntheses.
* * *
The title of
this lecture is misleading, and I should clarify it. By the word
"History," I mean the history of Europe and North America since the
seventeenth century. Within this more restricted time and space, I
have spent most of my life reading, teaching, exploring a few
corners of that still vast field, writing a modest amount,
and thinking a great deal, especially about the kind of history
related to war.[1]
From the outset, even as a graduate student, a familiar complaint
has troubled me, and being asked to deliver this lecture offers an
opportunity to consider that complaint more fully. The complaint is
about the gulf between, on the one side, the profession of history,
especially in colleges and universities, and, on the other side, the
history of war. The question of why this gulf exists has a variety
of answers.
Until the nineteenth century, a
great deal of both written and oral history was the history of war.
And then, between the battle of Waterloo and the peace conference at
Versailles, the history profession and the military profession began
to move in very different directions. The emergence of this gulf was
closely related to the process of professionalization taking place
on both sides, professionalizing historians seeking to broaden and
deepen historical inquiry by moving away from its traditional
preoccupation with wars and politics, professionalizing soldiers
trying to establish military science on universal principles
underlying armed conflict by a close study of military strategy and
operations.[2]
My concern here
is less with the origins of the divide, which became a virtual
canyon after the First World War, than with its existence and
persistence. At the risk of caricature let me briefly describe how
this gulf looks from each side. Military historians in and out of
the academy feel they get scant respect and even less attention from
their professional colleagues working in all the rest of history;
they are sure that those colleagues regard courses and books on
military history as not much better than a form of entertainment,
ever popular with students and the general public, but lacking the
qualities that foster serious critical thinking and genuine
understanding of the past. My own experience of this perception from
the far side of the gulf has been confirmed, more than once, by
being asked by a colleague who is teaching a course, say, on the
American Revolution, or the Civil War and Reconstruction, to give a
single lecture on the "war," meaning the military stuff. The
invitation invariably has come with a modest apology to the effect
that he or she just never got around to learning much about all the
fighting and bloodletting.
From the other
side of the gulf the view is usually less aggrieved than it is one
of benign aversion, "toleration" in the worst sense. Only when
issues of appointments and curriculum arise; that is, when money and
other scarce resources are at issue, is there much that looks like
real hostility, and then things can become nasty. I report on good
authority that the administrative head of a major American history
department, faced by the question of preserving the status of a
popular course in military history, pronounced the subject as of
interest only to "hormone-driven fraternity boys." In effect,
military history may be all right for those who like that sort of
thing, but it should not consume scarce resources nor be more than
peripheral to what is required of undergraduates who major in
history. Recently, Keith Thomas, a supremely gifted Oxford
historian, expressed the genteel tone of this patronizing
indifference in an essay on "How history's borders have expanded in
the past forty years." His sole reference to writing on war was as
follows: "Military and naval history are exceptionally
vigorous with a huge lay following for accounts of battles and
campaigns, not all of them intellectually demanding."[3]
To the logical argument that war has been and
continues to be centrally important in the unfolding of history, an
unpleasant truth that the historical profession ignores at its
peril, a typical academic replies, Yes, war is important in history,
but not in the way most military historians deal with it; few of the
books on war that fill the shelves of chain bookstores have much
relevance for what professional historians are striving to do. The
most important thing about war (I continue to sketch the view from
the non-military side of the gulf) for the professional historian is
its outcome; all the tiresome details of strategic decision,
operational movement, and the violence of the battlefield, whatever
their dramatic appeal, are simply not worth the time they require to
tell and to learn because those details rarely connect to anything
outside warfare itself. So the problem, says the non-military
historian, is not with the history of war as such, but with the way
military historians do it.
We can agree
that the existence of this gulf defies logic, history being the
seamless if tangled web of circumstance and action that all
historians try to recreate and convey. So the gulf must be
imaginary, maybe in current parlance "imagined;" yet it is quite
real, and its immediate consequence is, in my judgment, awful. The
gulf between history in general and the history of war means that
most teachers of history know little or nothing about war and its
role in modern history; as teachers, they fail to make it an
integral part of historical study but leave the impression that it
is an unfortunate excrescence, or, as one perceptive soldier-scholar
expressed it almost a century ago, "an irrational blotch."[4]
Our students in turn emerge from their years of liberal education
ignorant of war, understandably assuming that its absence from their
curriculum is a fair measure of its unimportance in human affairs.
Words fail me in trying to say what I think of this consequence.
In 1993 The Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton, by hosting a large symposium on "The
History of War as Part of General History," gave the reality of the
gulf something like official recognition even as the symposium was
intended to bridge the gulf.[5]
And the American Historical Association, despite a demonstrable
coolness to the field over the years, has officially proclaimed its
underlying friendliness toward military historians by incorporating
this, the George C. Marshall Lecture, into its annual meeting, while
in 2007 its quarterly journal published a broad survey and valuable
discussion of the best recent work in the field of military history.
The survey's author, Robert Citino, acknowledges that the imagined
gulf is all too real, and exhorts his fellow historians on the far
side to take time to learn how the best contemporary work in
military history transcends the old stereotype of drum and
trumpets--strategy, operations, and battles. So, is the imagined
gulf closing as we all grow gradually wiser than our benighted
predecessors?[6]
In seeking an
answer to the question, cross over to the far side where most of our
colleagues and friends reside. Is there some stirring over there,
some general movement on the far side to end this absurd division?
Citino's excellent article should awaken many historians to the
quality of the best work being done in military history, but I am
not optimistic about any more general movement to remedy decades of
aversion and neglect. In the mid-1970s two books set off a flutter
of interest among non-military historians in the subject of war:
The Face of Battle by John Keegan, and The Great War and
Modern Memory by Paul Fussell.[7]
Both books were widely read, even by non-military
historians, and much discussed, or at least cited. I recall being
asked about them by colleagues who suggested that if military
history were done as Keegan and Fussell had done it that it might be
worthy of serious attention. Keegan and Fussell may have softened up
the opposition, but I see little evidence that they have had any
lasting effect in modifying attitudes on the far side of the gulf.
What I do see,
and find encouraging, is that since the late 1980s, a small number
of accomplished historians who could in no way be labeled military
historians have found war to be an important subject, and have
written important books about it. From this small number, among
well-known and well-regarded academic historians writing in English
about war, four have caught my attention, four voices calling, so to
speak, from the far side of the gulf. They are the British
historian, John Brewer; an American historian of France, David Bell;
the British modern economic historian, Niall Ferguson; and an
American historian of Japan, John Dower. Taking them in order of
publication, I offer a précis of each book, followed by a brief
critical appraisal.
John Dower's
War without Mercy won the National Book Critics Circle Award for
1986. Dower today is a leading American historian of Japan, with a
Pulitzer Prize for his great book on Japan under American military
occupation.[8]
In War without Mercy he used all his language and research
skills to answer the question, Why was the Pacific War 1942–45 so
utterly barbaric, with incredible atrocities committed by both
sides? Drawing on a vast trove of words and pictures from Japanese
and American archives, Dower offers a blunt answer: Because it was a
race war, with each side doing all it could to dehumanize the other.
After reading the quoted public utterances, and viewing the
grotesque depiction of the evil, subhuman enemy in War without
Mercy, Dower's argument seems compelling.
John Brewer's
The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State
appeared in 1989.[9]
Brewer has a good claim to be the dean of historians
of early modern Britain, publishing major work in the political,
economic, social, legal, and cultural history of eighteenth-century
England. That he would produce a book with "war" in its subtitle is
surprising, but that book, Sinews of Power, is now regarded
as the definitive account of how England after 1688 went from being
a fairly weak state, both politically and militarily, and became by
mid-century one of the most powerful in the world. War was not
exactly the cause of this transformation, but war surely was a
catalytic factor. England waged five major wars between 1688 and
1783, when the book ends, and lost only one of them. By mid-century
Britain had become a true war state, with military expenditures
including the costs of previous wars accounting for about
four-fifths of its annual budget.
This is a
remarkable story. An earlier book edited by Brewer on
eighteenth-century England is titled an "ungovernable people", and
at the time the English people were indeed regarded as the most
liberal and lightly governed people in Europe.[10]
But the facts, seen under Brewer's lens, are clear:
while not the richest country in Europe, Britain's government was
the best at extracting wealth from its people for the purpose of
waging war, better than France, Prussia, Austria, or Russia. The key
according to Brewer was a relatively efficient tax-collecting
bureaucracy made legitimate by Parliamentary consent, and by its
accountability to Parliamentary agencies. Parliament of course did
not yet represent the "people," but it represented the propertied
and moneyed elite well enough to give Britain a tremendous advantage
over its autocratic rivals on the Continent.
Niall
Ferguson's The Pity of War fairly burst upon the historical
scene in 1998.[11]
Established by his first two books as a brilliant young economic
historian at Oxford University, he turned his talents to the Great
War 1914–1918, and proceeded to overturn almost all the standard
wisdom about the causes, course, and consequences of that war.[12]
British critics Left and Right were outraged by his argument that
British foreign policy pre-1914 might have, but failed, to deter a
major war, and that British decision-making in the crisis of 1914
was the chief reason a European war became a world war.[13]
He depicted a German victory, virtually inevitable without British
intervention, as probably better for Britain and everyone
else--ending in something like today's European Union, dominated by
the German economy. Once the war had begun, he argues, superior
Allied resources failed to win it because of inefficient utilization
by the Allied powers, and because the German Army was a much more
efficient fighting machine than any of its opponents, a conclusion
he supports by statistics showing that killing an enemy soldier cost
the Germans little more than a third of what killing an enemy cost
the Allies. In the end he argues that the treaties made at
Versailles were not so bad; what failed was their serious
enforcement.[14]
Last and most
recent of the four, David A. Bell published The First Total War,
in 2007.[15]
Bell is a leading historian of France both before
and after the Revolution of 1789. He is Andrew Mellon Professor in
the Humanities at Johns Hopkins, and is a regular reviewer for and
contributor to The New Republic. Nothing in his previous work
would suggest that he is in any way a military historian. His book
got a lengthy review in The New Yorker, and a high-lighted
summary by the author in The New York Times Sunday Magazine.[16]
The First
Total War is brilliantly written, and
weaves together at least three separate arguments. The first and
most important of these is in the title: that the wars of the French
Revolution and Napoleon prefigured the major wars of the twentieth
century, when nations brushed aside customary restraints to mobilize
every resource, human and material, and ignored legal and moral
limits on the use of force, military effort and political direction
becoming fused in a superheated emotional climate that made rational
control of war and its objectives extremely difficult if not
impossible. Bell's argument is not exactly new, dating back to
several earlier authors, but it is made forcefully and persuasively.
His other
arguments concern the relationship of these events to our own time.
He likens the few years after the end of the Cold War in 1989, when
hopes were briefly raised that wars were obsolete, to that moment in
the French Revolution just two centuries earlier when some
proclaimed that an Enlightened polity would bring an end to warfare.
Disillusionment rapidly followed in the 1790s as it would in the
1990s, and then in each case an epoch of horrific warfare ensued.
The linkage between the two periods, between the hopes before 1789
and 1989, and the violent reality that followed, is less historical
than psychological: disappointment and frustration triggered a
furious reaction; when war proved unavoidable, it was carried on in
each case without mercy or restraint. Throughout, Bell emphasizes
every instance in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of
what can be called terrorism and brutal counterinsurgency, pushing
his comparison with our own time to a Goyaesque extreme.
These two
arguments, about the emergence of total war and the effect of
disappointed hopes on military aggressiveness, tend to overshadow
Bell's most original and interesting argument, which is that the
wars of 1792–1815 were transformative, changing the very "culture"
of war in Western civilization. This culture of total war was
effectively stifled after 1815 for almost a century by artful,
determined, and lucky statesmen, only to erupt again in 1914, making
the twentieth century a nightmare of violence. And where did this
transformed culture of war root itself most deeply? Where else but
in that Enlightened Paradise, the most powerful nation-state to
emerge from the twentieth-century nightmare, the United States? The
three arguments twine around one another throughout a long book, but
Bell makes the point of origin for his thinking clearest in the
short piece he wrote for The New York Times; there he asks
why the American response to a clever but primitive and quite
limited attack on 9/11 was such a grotesque overreaction, declaring
a Global War on Terror. "What has happened is a growing willingness
to abandon traditional restraints on proved and suspected enemies,
foreign and American alike.... Could it be then that dreams of an end
to war may be as unexpectedly dangerous as they are noble, because
they seem to justify almost anything done in their name."[17]
Now these four very disparate
books are hardly perfect models for writing the history of war. All
in some way are vulnerable just where more attention to military
history might have made them stronger. Let me explain, taking them
again in turn.
Dower might have considered
another war, a war notorious for its ferocity and brutality,
contemporaneous with the Pacific War between the United States and
Japan, the war between Germany and the Soviet Union, where millions
died not only in battle but because the other side murdered them or
deliberately let them die in captivity from starvation and disease.[18]
Asking Dower to make his book a comparative study may be asking too
much, but he ought at least to have recognized that, in explaining
behavior, account must be taken of the behavior itself, which in
this case was how the Japanese and Americans actually fought for
control of the western Pacific. Large island garrisons, well armed,
well trained, and highly disciplined, but utterly cut off from any
hope of relief or reinforcement, and with orders to win or die, were
defending their islands against larger numbers of attackers with
massive firepower, equally determined to win at whatever cost--such
was the basic model of battle after battle across this vast ocean.
The recent popular film, "Letters from Iwo Jima," conveys very well
the essential horror of the operational reality of the Pacific War.
If Dower had paid as much attention to these realities as he did to
attitudes, he might well have reached a less simple, more nuanced
answer to his own question. He would have taken account of the
effect on soldiers in combat of terror, frustration, anger, and
hopelessness, as well as of the unique culture of the Imperial
Japanese Army and the U.S. Marine Corps.[19]
Looking at all the relevant evidence bearing on his question he
would have written a better book.
John Brewer does not ignore the
actual waging of war by Britain in the eighteenth century, but he
confines it to a pallid chapter entitled "The Parameters of War,"
following the first half of the book where he has developed his main
argument. It is a disappointing chapter because it is hardly more
than a summary, capturing little of the contingent, unpredictable
quality of wars in which British forces lost almost as many battles
as they won.[20]
Parliament, while not directing but surely
constraining British strategy as well as foreign policy, reacted
strongly to the ups and downs of military events. For the British
people, few of whom were personally involved in warfare, war served
as a great spectacle, amplifying the emotional impact of both
victory and defeat. If popular acquiescence was indeed the key to
British military strength, Brewer offers little sense that the
violent political and popular mood swings of wartime made much
difference.[21]
Instead he offers a fairly bland picture of ever-increasing British
strength, undisrupted by wartime crises and euphoria, a picture not
unlike the Whig version of British history, with Progress as its
main theme. Maybe in retrospect the progressive pattern fits the
ultimate outcome, but it hardly captures the historical truth of the
wars themselves (which soaked up all that tax money), as those wars
were actually waged by the English state. Like Dower writing about
racial ideology, Brewer seems to have little heart for the
blood-and-guts aspect of warfare that at the time was highly
interactive with the Parliamentary and popular opinion that made the
fiscal-war state work so effectively. The Sinews of Power is a great
book, but might have been better history with a less perfunctory
treatment of the wars that lay at its heart.
Niall Ferguson's main
arguments, based heavily on what-if reasoning, left many of his
reviewers unpersuaded, but his book is a lengthy, scholarly
reconsideration of the whole war, especially on the Western Front.
His arguments, however a reader may eventually judge them, are
surely worth serious consideration. What most impresses a military
historian is Ferguson's attention to the strategic and operational
aspects of the war, to the violent core of war itself. Unlike Brewer
and Dower, Ferguson is intensely interested in why men fought, how
they fought, and how--in the German case--they stopped fighting. His
weakest spot may be in the way he treats the war itself as a bloc,
aggregating his numbers to measure casualties and effectiveness,
allowing for little variation from one year to the next.[22]
Of course that is the way the war has been treated by many military
historians who are very critical of its leadership, seeing the war
as hopeless deadlock, four years of trenches, mud, death, and
futility, which is also the picture presented in most of the
memoirs, novels, and poetry arising from the Great War. But a
growing number of military historians have been exploring the
frantic and not always ineffective search for ways to break the
technological stalemate and restore mobile warfare, and their
findings surely deserve a place in Ferguson's analysis.[23]
Of Bell's
First Total War I admit that the book exasperated me on first
reading, with its entangled triad of arguments stretching across
centuries. But on re-reading the book along with the published
reviews, many of them critical, as well as Bell's own response to a
series of reviews posted on the French History net, I see better
what he was trying to do, and I judge his book to be a truly
valuable one. It is, after all, about war, and like Ferguson he does
not avert his gaze from the actual violence, or dwell on some
peripheral aspect of it that might appeal to social historians; war
itself is front and center. Unlike Dower and Brewer, Bell tackles
the military side of his subject, and thereby earns our attention.
Unfortunately,
his major and most interesting thesis, that the wars of the French
Revolution and Napoleon were a cultural transformation in the
Western way of war, a transformation that would eventually take hold
most strongly in the collective psyche of contemporary America, may
be correct, but as it is presented in the book it is hardly more
than a plausible conjecture unsupported by much evidence or even
argument. Worse is the way he lets our contemporary obsession with
terrorism influence his treatment of the Napoleonic wars.
Repeatedly, he compares the ruthlessness of French armies and of the
civilians who resisted them to events in Iraq in 2007. All war is
hell, and Napoleon's wars left the bodies of soldiers and civilians
strewn all across Europe, but by focusing on popular resistance to
French military occupation wherever it occurred, always with
atrocities on both sides, Bell greatly exaggerates its overall
significance for what happened in these wars. Armed resistance to
French military occupation was not uncommon in the First French
Empire, but it was also sporadic and with few exceptions quickly put
down; in no case did it cause any serious deviation from the course
of French military operations. The exceptions were in Spain, where
the term "guerrilla" was coined for the brutal fight by peasants led
by priests against French occupation, making service in Spain the
least desired in the Grande Armée; and also in the Vendée, where a
civil war in western France against the Revolution persisted, a
civil war that young General Bonaparte carefully avoided in his rise
to supreme power, resistance flickering on in the Vendée to the end
of his regime. Yet despite Spain and the Vendée, the Grande Armée
rolled on until it was defeated by larger coalition armies. To put
it most simply, Bell has allowed his understandable concern with the
events of the years since 9/11 to distort his account of warfare two
centuries ago; not terrorism, but the decisive clash of massive
armies was the true leitmotif of the Napoleonic Wars.
Four valuable
books on war by outstanding non-military historians, signifying
what? Comparable work has appeared between the delivery and
publication of this lecture.[24]
Even in their imperfections as they bridge the gulf between military
history and history in general, these books and others like them
should engage and stimulate military historians. Taken together,
these and comparable works constitute a wake-up call to military
historians to respond, critically but positively, by recognizing
what drew these historians to the subject of war, and to meet them
at least half way. Times are changing and at least a few of our
ablest colleagues hear the message that we know so well. The Pity of
War may already have become an unhappy example of an important book
rejected by military historians for its unorthodox methodology,
provocative style, and startling conclusions; this, it seems to me,
is a sad error, suggesting that at least some military historians
prefer to be left alone on their own side of the gulf.
Each of these authors has seen
the light about the historical importance of war. Beyond that shared
epiphany, they have written valuable books that go where military
historians too rarely tread--into the broader context within which
all war is waged. Dower, Brewer, Ferguson, and Bell, respectively,
have explored the ideological, administrative and financial,
economic, and cultural dimensions of war--terrain where military
historians do not often go. Of course we know that the wars we study
happen in a wider context, which is what our four historians have
been exploring, but military historians as a group have been too
comfortable, even complacent, about the accepted limits of our
inquiry. Military history, as it is usually conceived, readily
accepts conventional boundaries between warfare and peace, between
military and civilian, restricting our scope to the questions that
can best be answered by the evidence produced and preserved by
military organizations themselves, supplemented by whatever a few
surviving members of those organizations can recall after the event.
We as military historians do not often stray beyond the official end
of war to look at its immediate effects in the so-called postwar.[25]
These four books are, each in its way, flawed, but they recall us to
our main business, which is to study and write about war--unbounded
by any customary limits on our inquiry--with the aim of educating
ourselves, our colleagues, and ultimately our students and the
public about war in all its awful complexity and perversity.
It would be foolish to call for
a new military history that incorporated all or even most of the
contextual elements of any chosen subject. Historical research is
too specialized, and often too interdisciplinary, for any such
effort to be feasible. But what is most provocative in these four
books on war, in their deficiencies as well as their strengths, is
how they call attention to just those conventional limits of
military history: strategy, operations, battle, and peace (whenever
it officially breaks out). They represent a plea to us to loosen up
and look outward. Military historians have been content to work
within those classic limits, whose observance reinforces the
imagined gulf between history in general and the history of war.
Samuel Eliot Morison produced an elegantly written fifteen volumes
on American naval operations in the Second World War, but he found
no room to explore the almost miraculous economic and logistical
achievements that made most of those operations possible, perhaps
because logistics lack the dramatic excitement of battle.[26]
There are historians, it must
be said, who appear blissfully unaware of this awful gulf, who defy
easy categorization as military or non-military, and who write
excellent military history set firmly within its broader context,
historians like Michael Sherry for modern America, Geoffrey Parker
for early modern Europe, David Hackett Fischer for the Revolutionary
War, James McPherson for the American Civil War, and Fred Anderson
and Andrew Cayton for the whole of the American experience of war.[27]
Robert Middlekauf on the American Revolution, and David Kennedy on
the Second World War, both, like McPherson, writing
volumes for the series The Oxford History of the United States,
are other examples.[28]
As much as I admire these scholars, I also admire
the blue-collar military historian who occasionally looks up from
the work at hand to ponder what lies beyond the conventional border
of military history, and decides to explore that shadowy ground.
Ronald Spector is a model for what is here being advocated. Spector
wrote the best one-volume history of strategy and operations in the
Pacific War. He also delivered the Marshall Lecture three year ago,
in which he sketched the results of not stopping at war's end in
1945, in order to see what happened to the vast Japanese Empire
immediately after the Emperor had surrendered. That sketch has
become an excellent new book, its subject matter and narrative as
exciting and consequential as the battle of Midway or the 1944
decision to attack the Philippines rather than Formosa. Spector
tells us that the book began as "a rather nebulous project."[29]
Military history needs more nebulous projects like this one.[30]
If we know
anything for sure about war it is that it is extremely complicated
and ill-understood even by those charged with its management, a
realm of activity of remarkable unpredictability and dynamism, often
ramifying far beyond the intentions of those who undertake it. We
need look no further than the war in Iraq to recall how an
apparently successful military operation, just the kind of subject
suited to a monograph in military history, transmogrified into an
altogether different form of violence seemingly beyond the
comprehension of the putative victors.[31]
Peter Paret will be speaking this Fall at Cambridge
University on the "cognitive challenge of war"--of how the enemies
of Napoleon were as surprised by what they faced as Americans are
today in the Middle East. With these complexities of war in mind,
the traditional definition of military history ought to be
challenged as our selected four books challenge it, reminding all of
us who do strategic and operational history that just beyond the
accepted boundaries of our study is a context comprised of attitudes
and action that should not be forgotten because it may be, or may
become, highly relevant to what we and our readers want to know
about war.*
The University of Michigan
johnshy@umich.edu
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* The author wishes
to thank Peter Paret and the Michigan War Studies Group for their
critical response to an early draft of this lecture.
|