Ground Warfare: An International Encyclopedia (review)

To distinguish itself from general encyclopedias of military history, a work entitled Ground Warfare: An International Encyclopedia should provide readers with articles focused on aspects of ground warfare from across human history. The promise of the title is only partly fulfilled: while these three volumes do range beyond the western military experience, they do not provide a level of detail on aspects of ground warfare above that found in general encyclopedias of military history.

The attention to key topics in the history of ground warfare is disappointing. A three-volume work should have an article of more than twelve paragraphs on "Infantry" or sixteen paragraphs on "Artillery." The article on "Nuclear and Atomic Weapons" spends most of its length discussing the development of these weapons and their strategic implications, but does not discuss at all how armies changed their doctrine and equipment to adapt to these new weapons. To summarize the evolution of tactics and weapons in World War I by stating parenthetically "the German High Command seemed to be the only belligerents to have learned anything from the deadlock of trench warfare" (p. 963) is to leave readers far behind the current scholarship on this topic. There is no article on that most important topic of ground warfare, combat motivation. There also is no article on the lesser but still important topic of ground air defense.

Some editorial choices are inexplicable: there is an article on Meriwether Lewis, but not one on S. L. A. Marshall. Some editorial choices would have been better suited to a work of general military history: there is an article on the atomic bombing of Japan, but not one on the U.S. Army's Pentomic Era. Some editorial choices are debatable: there is an article on Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, but not one on Gen. William E. DePuy, a man whose influence on the U.S. Army was far more important than Schwarzkopf's generalship in the Persian Gulf War.

The usefulness of this work to students seeking a guide to other sources is badly compromised by the curious choices made in the references placed at the end of articles and in the selected bibliography. The article on the U.S. Army does not refer readers to the work of Russell E. Weigley. The article on infantry does not refer readers to the work of John A. English. S. L. A. Marshall's Men Against Fire, John Keegan's The Face of Battle, and Richard Holmes's Acts of War are not in the selected bibliography (Weigley's History of the United States Army and Towards an American Army also are missing from the bibliography.)

Ground Warfare: An International Encyclopedia was "written and edited with a broad public in mind" (p. xxv). That public will find these volumes to be a generally well-written work that is, in effect, a general encyclopedia of military history with the naval and air portions removed.