Letters to the Editor

We are always pleased to have letters to the editor because this shows that people are reading our Journal seriously. However, due to space limitations, we ask that letters be kept under 500 words.

To the Editor:

I am writing to answer the many doubts expressed by Professor Chris Storrs in reviewing my book, A Military History of Italy (JMH, Vol. 72, No. 3, pp. 932-33). Professor Storrs wrote that my book was "earlier reviewed in the journal when first published…in 2002 as Gli Italiani in Armi [The Italians in arms]." This is not the case. A whole paragraph in the Introduction to A Military History of Italy is devoted to explaining that it is not simply a translation of the earlier work, but a new history: based on a broader range of sources, more balanced than its predecessor, and rewritten in order to provide information required by an English-language audience that is not as familiar as it might be with Italian history.

Professor Storrs goes on to say, "There is a bibliography but it identifies only some of the more than 8,000 titles – and none of the archival sources – that Paoletti has apparently used." Aside from the suggestive word "apparently," this statement is correct. I do not list archival sources, though I would be happy to provide a list to anyone who is interested. As to the famous 8,000 titles, I, of course, had to be selective; listing them all would have taken up 155 A4 pages – a book in itself. The publisher would not have been happy.

Then, "The writing is…more trying than it should be because of the infelicities of the translation from original Italian." This is an interesting observation, because I wrote the book in English, and it was edited by an American professor of history whose latest book was favorably reviewed in the same issue of the JMH.

Professor Storrs laments my failure to treat sufficiently "important conflicts" that took place in the period before 1800, such as the "important alpine campaigns of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy during the second half of the War of the Spanish Succession" and the War of the Polish Succession. Readers should know that the publisher had asked me for a book on Italian military history since the unification of the country in 1861 and I was unable to devote more than a third of the coverage to the earlier period. So the five wars of the 1700-1748 period got just 13 pages. I was lucky to be able to give "just two pages" to the War of the Polish Succession.

To my great surprise and disappointment, this is where the review ended, with the first one-third of the book. I expected comments on what I thought were topics of interest to readers: that Venice's decline was due to its being politically trapped between France, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire; that the 1796-1814 French occupation of Italy cost Italians 37 times what the U.S. paid for the Louisiana Purchase; that construction of a modern Italian navy caused emigration; that the Italian defeat at Caporetto in the First World War was only a tactical setback; that the planned Italian invasion of Bavaria in the autumn of 1918 helped convince the Germans to surrender; and, above all, the hypothesis that Napoleon's victorious campaign in 1796 was due to a secret pact between Paris and the Kingdom of Savoy. But no, what we got was criticism for leaving out the alpine campaigns of 1708-09!

Such a limited review does a disservice not only to the author but to the potential readers of the book under consideration. When one accepts the responsibility of reviewing a book, he owes it to the author and readers to provide a complete discussion of the book's contents, not a few remarks on peripheral issues.

Ciro Paoletti
Rome, Italy
Professor Storrs does not wish to respond.

To the Editor:

Re: Hiroshima in History: the Myths of Revisionism (reviewed in the April 2008 JMH). Let me offer a broader view. My ten-year research on and writing of...