Military histories old and new: A reintroduction

American Historical Review

Volumn 112, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 1070-1090

  Citino, Robert M ^a  

^a EASTERN MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 41149103052     PISSN: 00028762     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/ahr.112.4.1070     Document Type: Review

References (123)

1. See the definition of the new military history given by Peter Paret in an address to the Society of Military History on March 23, 1991: "an expansion of the subject of military history from specifics of military organization and action to their widest implications, and also a broadening of the approaches to the subject, [and] of the methodological approaches." Quoted in John Whiteclay Chambers II, "The New Military History: Myth and Reality," Journal of Military History 55, no. 3 (1991): 397.
2. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766 (New York, 2000), xxi.
3. Robert Underwood Johnson and Clarence Clough Buel, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York, 1887-1888). Based on reminiscences from officers on both sides in the war's major battles, it has been widely reprinted, often in facsimile form, and is still today the primary source of choice for scholars, buffs, and re-enactors alike.
4. See, for example, the body of literature on black soldiers in the war. Although Dudley T. Cornish's groundbreaking The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861-1865 (New York, 1966) found few immediate successors, things began to change in the 1990s.
5. Joseph T. Glatthaar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York, 1990),
6. was the first to revisit Cornish's theme, and others joined in: Noah Andre Trudeau, Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862-1865 (Boston, 1998);
7. Versalle F. Washington, Eagles on Their Buttons: A Black Infantry Regiment in the Civil War (Columbia, Mo., 1999).
8. The trickle may be turning into a flood: Keith P. Wilson, Campfires of Freedom: The Camp Life of Black Soldiers during the Civil War (Kent, Ohio, 2002),
9. an analysis of camp life as a locus for "intra-military reconstruction"; the collection of essays edited by John David Smith, Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2002);
10. and Martin W. Ofele's cross-cultural account, German-Speaking Officers in the U.S. Colored Troops, 1863-1867 (Gainesville, Fla., 2004).
11. See, for example, George C Rabie, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana, Ill., 1989);
12. Elizabeth D. Leonard, Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War (New York, 1994);
13. and Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996). Gilpin Faust's work, in particular, was a challenge to accepted myths of the South at war. She identified the articulate women of the high planter class as having played a key role in the eventual Confederate surrender. They did not simply tend the hearth while the men were away; they adopted new roles, undertook new tasks, and won new autonomy. The dissonance between prewar strictures of patriarchy and wartime realities would eventually instill in them an anger against the war that had turned their lives upside down. Urging their men to stay home or desert or surrender may be seen, therefore, as a gendered act of self-assertion.
14. Mark Grimsley has been the key scholar here. His seminal The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865 (New York, 1995) was a challenge to the traditional narrative of Northern brutality.
15. It traced the evolution of Northern policy as it moved from conciliation of Southern civilians to pragmatism and finally to what Grimsley calls "hard war." Often portrayed as something new, it is in Grimsley's formulation something very, very old, harking back at least to the chevauchée, or mounted raiding expedition, of the Hundred Years' War. Not the indiscriminate plunder portrayed in film and novel, it was a tightly directed, almost surgical form of violence. The damage inflicted by Sherman's march to the sea, Grimsley writes, "turns out to be much exaggerated" (199). For a comparative analysis that challenges Grimsley on some points, see Steven V. Ash's When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995).
16. Grimsley has also edited two volumes of essays: one with Brooks D. Simpson, The Collapse of the Confederacy (Lincoln, Neb., 2001),
17. which includes Jean V. Berlin's response to Faust's Mother's of Invention, "Did Confederate Women Lose the War? Deprivation, Destruction, and Despair on the Home Front" (168-193);
18. and another with Clifford J. Rogers, Civilians in the Path of War (Lincoln, Neb., 2002), a useful volume that draws cross-cultural and cross-temporal connections between civilians caught up in conflict from ancient times to the present.
19. Donald R. Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (Lawrence, Kans., 2004);
20. Steven J. Ramold, Slaves, Sailors, and Citizens: African Americans in the Union Navy (DeKalb, Ill., 2002).
21. Shaffer, After the Glory, 203, 1.
22. Ramold, Slaves, Sailors, and Citizens, 182, 138, 182.
23. See, for example, Alice Kaplan, The Interpreter (New York, 2005),
24. and Jack Hamann, On American Soil: Murder, the Military, and How Justice Became a Casualty of World War II (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005).
25. Popular works on black American soldiers are flooding the market as well, for the first time opening up space within the "greatest generation" to African Americans. See, for example, Christopher Paul Moore, Fighting for America: Black Soldiers - The Unsung Heroes of World War II (New York, 2005),
26. as well as two books dealing with the same unit: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anthony Walton, Brothers in Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII's Forgotten Heroes (New York, 2004),
27. and Charles W. Sasser, Patton's Panthers: The African-American 761st Tank Battalion in World War II (New York, 2004).
28. See, for example, Reina Pennington, Wings, Women, and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat (Lawrence, Kans., 2002),
29. a book that should forever lay to rest the supposed unfitness of women for modern combat. Pennington has also edited an essential reference work, Amazons to Fighter Pilots: A Biographical Dictionary of Military Women (Westport, Conn., 2003).
30. A notable recent contribution is Emily Yellin's Our Mother's War (New York, 2004).
31. Yellin takes us through a number of different iterations of women's experience in World War II: wives and mothers waiting anxiously at home; entertainers both obscure (Denver disc jockey Jean Ruth) and famous (Carol Lombard);
32. WAVEs and WACVs, SPARs and WASPs. Of particular note are the chapters on African American women ("Jane Crow") and right-wing and antisemitic women's groups such as "We, the Mothers, Mobilize for America."
33. For a challenge to propagandistic notions of internal solidarity during the war, see Donald Thomas, The Enemy Within: Hucksters, Racketeers, Deserters and Civilians during the Second World War (New York, 2003),
34. dealing with Britain. Stephen G. Fritz, Endkampf: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Death of the Third Reich (Lexington, Ky., 2004), analyzes the period after the war but before the full restoration of "peace." Specifically, it narrates the American drive into Franconia, the collapse of Nazi society that it precipitated, the huge number of wandering "displaced persons" on the roads, and the change in U.S. attitude as American officials moved from encouraging anti-German acts of violence by former concentration camp inmates to insisting on the maintenance of law and order.
35. Flint Whitlock, Given Up for Dead: American GI's in the Nazi Concentration Camp at Berga (New York, 2005);
36. John A. Glusman, Conduct under Fire: Four American Doctors and Their Fight for Life as Prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945 (New York, 2005);
37. Brian MacArthur, Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 1942-45 (New York, 2005);
38. Roger Cohen, Soldiers and Slaves: American POWs Trapped by the Nazis' Final Gamble (New York, 2005);
39. and Chester Hearn, Sorties into Hell: The Hidden War on Chichi Jima (Guilford, Conn., 2005).
40. Messerschmidt's original blast against the Werhrmacht leadership was Die Wehrmacht im NS-Staat: Zeit der Indoktrination (Hamburg, 1969).
41. For an up-to-date report on the state of the question, see Wolfram Wette, The Werhrmacht: History, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, Mass., 2006),
42. a translation of the original German work, Die Wehrmacht: Feindbilder, Vernichtungskrieg Legenden (Frankfurt, 2002).
43. Orner Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (New York, 1986);
44. Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York, 1991).
45. See also the magisterial one-volume history of World War II by Gerhard L. Weinberg, who accuses the Wehrmacht of "willing, even enthusiastic, participation" in the horrors being perpetrated in the East: A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, new ed. (Cambridge, 2005), 300.
46. Alexander B. Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg Ideology, and Atrocity (Lawrence, Kans., 2003), xiv, xv.
47. Edward B. Westermann, Hitler's Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East (Lawrence, Kans., 2005);
48. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992);
49. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996).
50. Westermann, Hitler's Police Battalions, 238-239, 77, 103.
51. Geoffrey P. Megargee, War of Annihilation: Combat and Genocide on the Eastern Front, 1941 (Lanham, Md., 2005).
52. Geoffrey P. Megargee, Inside Hitler's High Command (Lawrence, Kans., 2000), xiv.
53. Megargee, War of Annihilation, xiv.
54. Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (New York, 1962).
55. See, for example, Bernard S. Bachrach, Merovingian Military Organization, 481-751 (Minneapolis, Minn., 1972);
56. and Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire (Philadelphia, 2001).
57. See for example, John France, Victory in the East: A Military History of the First Crusade (Cambridge, 1994);
58. France, Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, 1000-1300 (London, 1999);
59. and France, The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom, 1000-1714 (London, 2005).
60. For Kelly De Vries, see Medieval Military Technology (Peterborough, Ont., 1992)
61. and Guns and Men in Medieval Europe, 1200-1500: Studies in Military History and Technology (Aldershot, 2002).
62. Michael Roberts, The Military Revolution, 1560-1660: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the Queen's University of Belfast (Belfast, 1956);
63. Geoffrey Parker, "The Military Revolution, 1550-1660: A Myth?" Journal of Modem History 48, no. 2 (1976): 195-214,
64. as well as his later book The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and Rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1988).
65. See John A. Lynn, "The trace italienne and the Growth of Armies: The French Case," Journal of Military History 55, no. 3 (1991): 297-330,
66. as well as "Recalculating French Army Growth during the Grand Siècle, 1610-1715," French Historical Studies 18, no. 4 (1994): 881-906.
67. One cannot find a better guide to the debate than Clifford J. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (Boulder, Colo., 1995), which contains reprints of the seminal articles by Roberts, Parker, and Lynn, and much more.
68. See Jeremy Black, A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society, 1550-1800 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1991),
69. as well as Black, European Warfare, 1660-1815 (New Haven, Conn., 1994);
70. Kaushik Roy, "Military Synthesis in South Asia: Armies, Warfare, and Indian Society, c. 1740-1849," Journal of Military History 69, no. 3 (2005): 654;
71. Clifford J. Rogers, "The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years' War," Journal of Military History 57, no. 2 (1993): 241-278;
72. and Andrew Ayton, Knights and Warhorses: Military Service and the English Aristocracy under Edward III (New York, 1994).
73. Weston F. Cook, Jr., The Hundred Years' War for Morocco: Gunpowder and the Military Revolution in the Early Modem Muslim World (Boulder, Colo., 1994);
74. Roy, "Military Synthesis in South Asia";
75. Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, 1500-1700 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1999);
76. Jeremy Black, War in the Early Modem World, 1450-1815 (Boulder, Colo., 1999).
77. Dennis E. Showalter, Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology, and the Unification of Germany (Hamden, Conn., 1976).
78. Dennis E. Showalter, "A Modest Plea for Drums and Trumpets," Military Affairs 39, no. 2 (1975): 72.
79. Dennis E. Showalter, Tannenberg: Clash of Empires (Washington, D.C., 2004);
80. Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the Great (London, 1996);
81. Showalter, The Wars of German Unification (London, 2004).
82. Showalter, The Wars of Frederick the Great, 177-192.
83. Showalter, The Wars of German Unification, 49.
84. Reed Browning, The War of the Austrian Succession (New York, 1993).
85. Reed Browning, "New Views on the Silesian Wars," Journal of Military History 69, no. 2 (2005): 522, 523, 533.
86. Next to Showalter, no one currently writes better operational history than Geoffrey Wawro. His works on the wars of German unification - The Austro-Prussian War: Austria's War with Prussia and Italy in 1866 (Cambridge, 1996)
87. and The Franco-Prussian War The German Conquest of France in 1870-1871 (Cambridge, 2003)
88. - as well as his survey Warfare and Society in Europe, 1792-1914 (London, 2000) all exhibit the same qualities: exhaustive research in multiple languages and multinational archives, a cynical eye toward received versions of the event, and some of the best writing in the profession.
89. He is also adept at incorporating modern trends in military scholarship, especially the post-Vietnam "Clausewitz revival" that took place in U.S. military circles. Elements such as fog, friction, and the tension between personal behavior and systemic constraints all figure prominently here, as does the role of contingency. Adrian R. Lewis, Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2001),
90. is the best single volume written on this campaign. It is exhaustively researched and highly critical of the flawed U.S. planning process that resulted in a near-catastrophe for the troops on the beach. More recently, Lewis has taken up larger, more systemic questions with The American Culture of War: The History of U.S. Military Force from World War II to Operation Iraqi Freedom (New York, 2006),
91. a work that traces the painful transformation of a military culture that was built originally on the concept of equality of sacrifice, but that now tries to fight wars that are as divorced from the day-to-day lives of Americans as possible. Another worthy operational historian is Michael V. Leggiere. His Napoleon and Berlin: The Franco-Prussian War in North Germany (Norman, Okla., 2002)
92. is a brilliant work by a scholar who is as well versed in the general political and social historiography of his field as he is within his military specialty. See also Krisztián Ungváry, The Siege of Budapest: 100 Days in World War II (New Haven, Conn., 2005),
93. for an operational history that places campaign and battle squarely within their political and social matrix. Carol Reardon's most recent work, Launch the Intruders: A Naval Attack Squadron in the Vietnam War, 1972 (Lawrence, Kans., 2005), is a complex combination of new and traditional forms of military history: part battle narrative; part social history of a single naval air squadron in the latter years of the Vietnam War, when a fully coalesced antiwar movement had finally begun to have an impact on the mentalities of soldiers abroad; and part history of memory.
94. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York, 1975).
95. Carol Reardon, Pickett's Charge in History and Memory (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997);
96. Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1998).
97. Emily S. Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (Durham, N.C., 2003).
98. Ibid., 50.
99. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York, 1976);
100. Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy (New York, 1982);
101. Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941-45;
102. John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York, 1986);
103. John Shy, "The Cultural Approach to the History of War," Journal of Military History 57, no. 5 (1993): 13-26.
104. For the research that made Hanson a respected scholar of classical warfare, see The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (Berkeley, Calif., 1989),
105. as well as his most recent work, A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (New York, 2005).
106. The book discussed here is Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (New York, 2001).
107. Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 4.
108. One recent reviewer has gone so far as to say that there are "two Victor Hansons, both prolific." One is a "distinguished classicist and military historian"; the other is "the hard-right political pundit widely known in print and internet publications." James P. Holoka, review of Hanson's A War Like No Other, Michigan War Studies Review, May 1, 2006, http://www.michiganwarstudiesreview.com/2006/20060501.asp (accessed April 30, 2007).
109. Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 5, 351.
110. Ibid., 407.
111. John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture (Boulder, Colo., 2003), xiv.
112. Ibid., xx-xxi, 128-129.
113. Ibid., xx.
114. John A. Lynn, "The Embattled Future of Academic Military History," Journal of Military History 61, no. 4 (1997): 777-789.
115. Quoted in Rosenberg, A Date Which Will Live, 189.
116. Kenneth Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (Cambridge, 2003);
117. Kenneth M. Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948-1991 (Lincoln, Neb., 2002).
118. Pollack, Arabs at War, 374.
119. Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, N.Y., 2005), 105-107, 168, 170.
120. The term "double militarism" was coined by German military historian Stig Förster. For another view of German military culture that corroborates Hull in many ways, but that focuses much more tightly on actual military operations, see Robert M. Citino, The German Way of War: From the Thirty Years' War to the Third Reich (Lawrence, Kans., 2005).
121. Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500-2000 (New York, 2005), ix, xi.
122. For another contemporary scholarly argument on the imperial nature of the American republic, see the two controversial works by Andrew J. Bacevich: American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, Mass., 2002)
123. and The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (Oxford, 2005).