War Stories

John Mosier, The Myth of the Great War: A New Military History of World War One (New York: Harper Collins, 2001).

John Mosier, The Blitzkrieg Myth: How Hitler and the Allies Misread the Strategic Realities of World War Two (New York: Harper Collins, 2003).

The interest of Mosier's works is not so much what he writes—there is a fair amount of misunderstanding, if not error, on offer in his books—but rather what his work indicates about the state of military history. A general and a more specific point arise. The tension between history as question/questioning and history as answer/answering, a tension that overlaps with, but is not completely coterminous with, that between research and theory, is accentuated in the case of military history by the extent to which it appears to attract more than its fair share of assertive individuals not given to qualification and self-doubt. This may seem rather crude psychology, but I invite readers to survey the extent of either in the works of prominent scholars in the field. Indeed the manner of Mosier's piece (which replicates that of a number of other scholars) is amusing. There is little by way of self-doubt and relatively limited citation of the work of others except when the author as hero is castigating their folly. Mosier appears to have a low view of history, especially military historians, and particularly British ones, and he is critical of the use of primary sources, so it is unlikely that he will be interested in my comments or in those of Michael Howard who had recently pointed out that "the only way to answer these questions is to plough through the military documentation; the training manuals, the operational orders, the war diaries, the plans for operations as they developed at every level of command, the after-action reports, the organisation of logistics."¹

Mosier's account of World War One, in his book, is deeply flawed. He fails to understand what happened in 1918 or over the previous years, exaggerates the role of the U.S.A. on the ground in the final defeat of Germany,² and underrates the first-rate material written in English by British and American scholars on the French contribution. Furthermore, the excellent work on improvements in Allied warmaking, especially on the learning curve in artillery-infantry coordination, produced by scholars such as Wilson, Prior, Travers, Griffith, Sheffield and Beckett, requires appropriate notice. Gary Sheffield has drawn attention to Mosier's failure to move beyond the 1960s' "lions led by donkeys" approach and to take advantage of subsequent scholarship.³ The emphasis on the American role on the ground in the 1918 campaign is not only a misunderstanding of that campaign, but also an aspect of the isolation of the American military experience and imagination that can be more generally misleading. There is a problem of the conflation of "an American mythology of military prowess"⁴ with an exaggerated sense of exceptionalism in American military history.⁵

As far as Blitzkrieg is concerned, there is again a mass of first-rate work, not only on the tactical and operational dimension, but also on the strategic, economic, and ideological aspects. Yet, to cite scholarship is not really going to help if we are dealing with a writer whose idea of the subject is encapsulated in remarks such as "The Allies really were surprised in 1939–1940. They had been wallowing in a sort of self-congratulatory complacency after 1918, had convinced themselves that they had beaten the German army at every turn."⁶ Nothing as vulgar as citing papers from government committees or the private correspondence of ministers or generals. Try for example those of the Committee of Imperial Defence in the Public Record Office or Montgomery-Massingberd's private correspondence in the Liddell Hart archive. Or, for that matter, referring to recent books such as Nick Smart's on the Phoney War.⁷ As a British author...