In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

March/April 2005 · Historically Speaking 13 While some myths are relatively harmless and easily refuted and pose little danger to corrupting the military art, other myths can be especially harmful and lead the authors of doctrine and strategy to false conclusions and, eventually, to poorly thought out operational concepts and strategies. James S. Corum, a professor at the U.S. Air Force School ofAdvancedAirpower Studies, is also on thefaculty at the Army War College. He is the author of'The Roots of Blitzkrieg (University Press of Kansas, 1992) and The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 19181940 (University Press ofKansas, 1997). 1 William Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic (Simon and Schuster, 1969), 611-12. 2 Major Paul Raborg, MechanizedMight: The Story ofMechanized Warfare (Whittlesley House, 1942), 255. 3 Alistair Home, To Lose a Battle: France 1940 (Penguin, 1969), 218-220. 4 See Alistair Home and William Shirer's works for a full critical analysis of the 1940 campaign that spares neither the generals nor the politicians. 5 See James S. Corum, The Roots ofBlitzkrieg (University Press ofKansas, 1992), 136-143. Rhetoric or Reality? A Few Problems with Military History John Mosier James Corum's dissection of some ofthe more prominent myths of May 1940 complements chapters 5 and 6 of The Blitzkrieg Myth. Like Matthew Cooper, Corum and I are clearly skeptical not only about the idea of "Blitzkrieg as a strategy," but also about the related bundle of claims.1 My reservation is that as the concept is usually described, Blitzkrieg is a tactic, not a strategy , one reason it is so easily debunked by anyone who looks at the evidence. Myth (or legend) is an imprecise term. There are also falsehoods (or lies) and false ideas. False ideas are a mixture of truth and lies, and thus have great persistence. Technically speaking, I believe they are not myths. A myth is a false idea whose support derives from literary or folkloric beliefs. The Guderian legend cited by Corum is a false idea whose appeal comes mostly from a literary myth: the lone hero does battle against powerful forces. Whether those forces are monsters or monster bureaucrats of the Reichsheer, it's the same myth: Shane, Guderian, Beowulf, or Spider Man. The term falsehood comes from Polybius: "There are two kinds of falsehood, the one being the result of ignorance and the other intentional ... we should pardon those who depart from the truth through ignorance, but unreservedly condemn those who lie deliberately ."2 A contemporary French revision speaks of simple and complex lies. It was only in the 1980s, as I was trying to write the first reasonably objective accounts of the development of the cinema in Poland and Hungary after 1945, that I became aware of the pernicious effects of complex lies on our understanding of history. So when I began work on the First World War, I was not surprised to see the same failures disfiguring many standard accounts, and in The Myth of the Great War, bearing in mind Polybius's "deliberately," I attempted to provide a brief explanation of how this had come about. The idea of writing a book on the subject intrigued me, but Myth was not intended to be that book; nor, despite Dennis Showalter's characterization of me as a polemicist, was it intended as a controversial argument. My intention was simply to give Anglo-American readers an account ofan important part ofthe war with which they were unfamiliar. I began to uncover evidence that really contradicted much ofwhat was said about the war (regarding, for example, the April 1915 French offensive in the Wöevre and the August 1917 offensive at Verdun), and I was struck by the parallel with a rather basic model taken from the history of science. In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas S. Kuhn argued that the models of the universe that scientists construct, which he calls paradigms, are with time replaced by new ones, as the older paradigm has too many things it can't explain.3 Kuhn's basic example was the shift from the Ptolemaic model of a stationary earth around which everything moved to the one introduced by Copernicus...

pdf

Share