The Cambridge History of Warfare (review)

This is a history of warfare, though not solely of battles: maps illustrate the geopolitical and strategic contexts but not details of fights. The eight contributors trace what the editor calls the Western Way of War from 600 BC to the present: ‘western’ incorporating Russia and the Soviet (and post-Soviet) Union, with a look also at the recent Balkan civil wars and post colonial Africa. This way of war is defined by certain key characteristics which emerged in Greek and especially Roman military life, where the connection between social organisation, technology and tactics was the harbinger of western military primacy. Later accretions or developments, especially the creation of full-time professional armies and navies and the raising and use of credit to finance them placed the west in a position to conquer the world. Other nations and civilisations could invent significant materials for war, such as gunpowder, but failed to integrate them into their military life and thought. These western advances, with that acute awareness of the value of science and technology to warfare, created the means by which western states defeated formidable foes: and then almost destroyed each other in two world wars.

The book is divided into four main sections, each with sub-sections, and is chronologically arranged, but the editor has kept a tight rein on his contributors. The reader can dip in at any point, but is always aware of the broader theme. The lack of detailed battle maps assùmes that the reader has some to hand but does not compromise the clarity of the argument. There are many excellent summaries of controversial topics, such as Williamson A. Murray’s assessments of the Battle of the Somme, and of the Allied bombing campaign of the Second World War, though his account of the reasons why the Warsaw uprising of 1944 was left to its fate by the Soviet Army might be modified by Richard Overy’s Russia’s War (1997). The claim in the bibliography that the ‘we should not forget that the Germans had a fundamentally different reaction to the [first world] war’ (p. 472) is debatable: Wilhelm Klemm’s poem ‘Clearing Station’ (1914) could well have been written by Siegfried Sassoon in his most bitter anti-war mood. But these and other assessments enliven the conceptual value of a book that lays bare the sinews of war and yet reflects a humane appreciation of its tragic aspects.

The editor has no doubt that the West’s way of war is firmly based on past experience; but can it retain its lead over all-comers? His conclusion is more upbeat than many modern commentators would venture. The threat of global terrorism shows that even the most sophisticated peoples can be dismayed by a 9/11, but Geoffrey Parker exhorts the West with a quotation from Winston Churchill: ‘You know, in war you don’t have to be nice, you only have to be right’ (p. 432). But these days being right is harder than it sounds; and it is the West’s inner lack of certainty about its rightness that poses the current challenge to the Western way of war, and one not resolved by those traditional advantages, technology and money.