Combat \-\- A Neglected Area of Military History: An Investigation into Eye-Witness Reports from the Seven Years' War (1756-63) and the First World War (1914-1918) (review)

Author Felleckner's chief aim is to reproduce a group of battles for his readers "as realistically, vividly and understandably as possible." He says he will pay no attention to the political, economic, or social backgrounds of wars for he feels that those factors are not decisive in defining what actually occurred. His selection of battles may appear arbitrary: two from the Seven Years' War, then three from World War I, followed by two from the Seven Years' War, then a final two from World War I. However, since his purpose is to anatomize combat behavior itself, the sequence of battles he chooses to examine may not be very important Yet one does wonder if information taken from additional wars might have yielded somewhat different conclusions. For instance, he notes that in the examples he chose there was no mass fighting at close quarters and that the soldiers had no general will to attack (p. 114). One has to wonder whether troops would have behaved in exactly the same way in mélées, such as the one at the battle of Agincourt, or in a guerrilla firefight in Vietnam.

Several of his observations will seem familiar to anyone who has read the literature of combat studies, for instance, the notion that soldiers fight to preserve their lives, not for "Emperor, People and Homeland" (p. 104), that veteran troops understand that they are more likely to survive by moving toward the enemy, and that the behavior of troops, under chaotic battle conditions, can make irrelevant even well-thought-out plans of their commanders. Indeed much of what he discusses is so familiar from, among others, the works of Henri Barbusse, Erich Maria Remarque, Ernst Jünger, C. J. J. J. Ardant du Picq, and S. L. A Marshall, some of which he quotes at length, that it belies the book's subtitle: "a neglected area of military history."

Nevertheless, this brief book could prove useful to junior officers or to military history students who want a brief introduction to the study of combat behavior.

One oddity: the author refers to the Central Powers in World War I as the Axis (for instance, pp. 107, 108). Perhaps this was an error by the translator, John Murdock.