Thinking War – History Lite?

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Notes

¹Numbers in parentheses: page references to the work under review.

²Eric A. Havelock, War as a Way of Life in Classical Culture (Ottawa: Univ. of Ottawa Press 1970).

³William V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327–70 B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1979) 53.

⁴Origins: Alan Watson, International law in Archaic Rome: War and Religion (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP 1993); practical application: Harris, War and Imperialism, 166–75 (quotation, 167).

⁵See especially Susan P. Mattern, Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Principate, (Berkeley CA: Univ. of California Press 1999), especially Ch. 5 (‘Values').

⁶I owe the last notion to my late friend and colleague, Sanford Elwitt. Its applicability extends far beyond Rome's approach to the ‘Jewish Question’.

⁷Heuser repeatedly presents Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz as a far-seeing apostle of deterrence (246, 247, 361, 504). But the archives demonstrate that Tirpitz sought decisive offensive victory over Britain; his so-called ‘risk theory’ was public relations and strategic deception, not strategy: Volker R. Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan (Düsseldorf: Droste 1971), 109, 184–95.

⁸Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca NY: Cornell UP 2004), Part II; MacGregor Knox, To the Threshold of Power: Origins and Dynamics of the Fascist and National Socialist Dictatorships, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: CUP 2007), 100–4.

⁹The quotation stems from the Army's distillation of the wisdom painfully acquired (or not acquired) in 1914–18: H. Dv. 487, Führung und Gefecht der verbundenen Waffen (3 vols. Berlin, 1921–24; reprint, Osnabrück: Biblio Verlag 1994) Vol. 3, 31. But the sentiment merely restates Prussian tradition; see for instance Schlieffen, in Gerhard Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan (London: Wolff 1958), 50.

¹⁰Grosser Generalstab, Kriegsbrauch im Landkriege (Berlin: Mittler 1902), 3 (my emphasis).

¹¹Although it was a chapter title in the 1912 bestseller of General Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War (London: Edward Arnold 1914), vi, 85.

¹²See especially Adolf Gasser, Preussischer Militärgeist und Kriegsentfesselung 1914 (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn 1985); Annika Mombauer, ‘A Reluctant Military Leader? Helmuth von Moltke and the July Crisis of 1914’, War in History 6/4 (1999), 417–46; idem, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge: CUP 2001).

¹³Belgium: John Horne and Alan Kramer, The German Atrocities of 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT: Yale UP 2001).

¹⁴Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1989), 53; Jay M. Winter, ‘Some Paradoxes of the First World War,’ in idem and Richard Wall (eds), The Upheaval of War (Cambridge: CUP 1988), 30–2; K. David Patterson and Gerald F. Pyle, ‘Geography and Mortality of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 65/1 (1991), 14.

¹⁵John S. Oxford et al., ‘A Hypothesis: The Conjunction of Soldiers, Gas, Pigs, Ducks, Geese and Horses in Northern France During the Great War Provided the Conditions for the Emergence of the “Spanish” Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919’, Vaccine 23 (2005), 940–45; global deaths: Patterson and Pyle, ‘Geography and Mortality of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic', 15.

¹⁶Scheidemann (who proclaimed the German Republic on 9 Nov.), in Offer, The First World War, 76.

¹⁷For recent exhaustive treatment, Boris Barth, Dolchstosslegenden und politische Desintegration. Die Trauma der deutschen Niederlage im ersten Weltkrieg 1914–1933 (Düsseldorf: Droste 2003).

¹⁸See especially Alex Danchev, ‘Liddell Hart and the Indirect Approach’, Journal of Military History 63/2 (1999), 313–37; contrast also the sources cited in Corelli Barnett, ‘A Military Historian's View of the Great War’, in Baroness Stocks (ed.), Essays by Divers Hands (London: Oxford UP 1970), 1–18, with any of Ernst Jünger's best-selling war books.

¹⁹Department of the Army, The United States Army in the World War, 1917–1919, Vol. 10, The Armistice (Washington DC: USGPO 1948), 29.

²⁰Raimondo Luraghi, ‘La grande strategia della guerra civile americana e l'avvento della guerra totale’, Revue internationale d'histoire militaire (1978), 293.

²¹The infantry view: Paul Fussell, Thank God for the Atom Bomb and other Essays (New York: Summit 1988), 13–37; for well-targeted deflation of another myth that Heuser apparently endorses (335), Tami Davis Biddle, ‘Dresden 1945: Reality, History, and Memory’, Journal of Military History 72/2 (2008), 413–49.

²²See Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (New York: Random House 1999), 350–5; US casualty projections, 130–48, 338–43.

²³Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi War Economy (London: Penguin 2006), 596–8 and graph, 600.

²⁴See Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (London: Pimlico 1995), 127–33.

²⁵Frank Downfall, 293–5, 310, 314, 345.