American Military History: A Look at the Field

This essay will not do justice to the field of American military history. That claim is not based on some sort of false modesty on the part of the author, but rather the wide diversity of the field itself. Others have ably and thoroughly cataloged the developments in military historiography in recent years—including Robert Citino, Mark Moyar, Stephen Morillo and Michael Pavkovic, and Wayne Lee—so there is no need to plow that ground again.¹ Rather the intent here is to use some recently published books to look at trends in the field and to discuss the difficulties and opportunities created by those trends.

Most readers likely associate military history with the works that line the shelves of popular retailers: studies of wars, campaigns, and battles. Generals and admirals usually serve as the protagonists of such works, with their decisions making the difference between victory and defeat in a grand drama upon which hangs the fate of nations. Professional military historians call this branch of the field operational military history, and it has a long history of its own. But for all of its popular dominance, operational military history has increasingly become something apart from the study of military history in academic circles. Perhaps because operational studies are so common in popular culture, academics almost see them as the easy or simple part of what they do. At most, academics require the basic narrative of campaigns and battles—who won and why, according to the agreed-upon best book or two on the subject. As a result, this branch of the field has grown remarkably stale in the last few decades. Books by the hundreds have seen Napoleon square off against Wellington at Waterloo, Lee against Meade at Gettysburg, and Eisenhower against Rommel in Normandy. Remarkably few, however, say anything new. Academic history is revisionism—finding new evidence and bringing new methods or views to develop new interpretations. However, because academic military historians rarely research operational history, fundamental challenges to the conventional narratives are also rare—which is too bad, because operational military history done properly is neither easy nor simple.

There is plenty of room for new approaches to old wars, something that Michael Matheny has proven in his new study, Carrying the War to the Enemy. The standard narrative has it that the United States military was entirely un-prepared for World War II. Military officers of the era, restricted by limited budgets and lack of imagination in the prewar period, bungled their way through the opening of the war. Only through costly lessons learned and the brute application of overwhelming American material advantages did the United States wear down its German and Japanese foes and win the war. With the exception of the rare maverick like General George S. Patton, the real geniuses at fighting were the Germans, but they were hamstrung by Hitler’s overbearing direction and a severe deficit in men and material compared to the Allied forces. It is an argument with some truth, but has become so entrenched as to be paradigmatic.

Matheny turns the paradigm on its head. The problem with the conventional narrative is that it does not explain all that professional American military officers had to do to win the war. Leaving aside the strategic issues of raising, training, and equipping fleets, air forces, and armies, there are still the questions of what needed to be done to deploy, direct, and sustain those forces...