Military History and the History of War

Michael Howard

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When the first university chair in our subject was established at Oxford in the first decade of the twentieth century, its field was defined simply as “Military History,” and it took two world wars to broaden this to the “History of War.” I have no firm evidence for this, but I suspect that the change was made to make it clear that the incumbent was expected to cover naval and air matters as well.

The same enlargement occurred in the scope of the only other similar chair in this country, which was established after the First World War at King's College London for Lloyd George's nemesis, General Sir Frederick Maurice, and about this I can speak with greater authority. The people responsible for reviving it after the Second World War were not military men; they were academics in the University of London who had been involved in the civilian conduct of the war – economists like Lionel Robbins, social historians like Sir Keith Hancock, diplomatic specialists like Sir Charles Webster. They knew from personal experience that the conduct of war was too serious a business to be left to the generals and believed in consequence that the study of war was too important to be left to military historians. The scope that they had in mind was so wide that they were not sure how to define it.

I recall a meeting of the great and the good in the early 1950s, where the title of the chair was being debated. Because its subject matter was not confined to history, they adopted that usefully vague term “studies”; one that was then in its infancy and today provides cover for innumerable soggy nonsubjects. But how were these “studies” to be defined? If they were not “military,” what were they? “Defense Studies” was deemed too mealy mouthed. “Strategic Studies” was too narrow. “Conflict Studies” was too broad. One learned scholar suggested, in desperation, “Polemelogical Studies.” At last Sir Charles Webster, a blunt and massive Yorkshireman, hit the table with a fist the size of a large ham and demanded: “It's about war isn't it? So what's wrong with War Studies?”

So, War Studies it became and has remained ever since. I was put in to hold the fort until they could find someone more eminent to occupy the chair (which I am glad to say they never did), and they genially made it clear to me that there were no limits to the claims I might stake out. I myself might teach the history of war, which was all I knew about, but I was to recruit as widely as possible among other disciplines: international relations, naturally; strategic studies, a subject whose birth had just been precipitated by the invention of nuclear weapons; economics, and the social sciences in general; law, both international and constitutional; anthropology; theology—indeed anything that I could think of and whose practitioners I could interest. If black studies, gender studies, gay studies, or media studies had then existed, I would certainly have colonized them as well. In short, I laid the foundation for that vast empire over which Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman now presides on both banks of the Thames.

I am myself always a little uneasy when described as a “military historian.” Until very recently, the great majority of professional historians found it hard to think of the term in anything but a rather pejorative sense: “military history is to history,” as I think someone once said, “what military music is to music.” To dismiss it in this way is of course grossly unfair, but for doing so I think there have been two good reasons. “Military history” was equated with “operational history,” and most of it – at least, before the twentieth century – was written, and studied, to enable soldiers to be better at their jobs. This was and remains a quite legitimate function. Past wars provide the only database from which the military learn how to conduct their profession: how to do it and even more important, how not to do it.

Good, accurate military history serves a necessary purpose so long as we have a military profession at all. Clausewitz warned of the misuse of military history, of expecting it to provide “school solutions” rather than to educate the minds of the military commander to expect the unexpected, but his warnings have all too often been ignored. One does not, or anyhow should not, study the past in order to discover the “school solutions” – that is the first “lesson” that professional historians have to drum into the heads of their pupils. Nevertheless, however intelligently it may be studied, military history has preserved for many of its readers and writers a distinct didactic purpose to which few other branches of historical studies would lay claim and one which they regard with understandable suspicion.

The second characteristic of much – indeed I would say most – military history is its parochialism. It has all too often been written to create and embellish a national myth, and to promote deeds of derring-do among the young. I would like to be able to say that this is a characteristic that military historians have now outgrown, but we have only to step into any bookshop to see that this would not be true. Leaving earlier history aside, the First World War in British historiography focuses almost exclusively on the British Army's heroic sufferings and achievements on the Western Front. The Second World War is ransacked to provide material for the glorification of our past, while shelves are still being filled with scrapings from barrel bottoms about the Gulf and Falklands Wars.

Heaven knows that we are not the only ones to be parochial: American military historians, with a few brilliant exceptions like Carlo d'Este, seem unaware that the United States had any allies in the Second World War at all, in either Europe or the Pacific, and I doubt whether the Russians are any less oblivious either, although they have better reason. No wonder bookshops have special sections on “military history” carefully quarantined from history proper. Some of my colleagues refer to it as “pornography”: This is going a bit far, but I understand what they mean.

This parochialism is particularly marked in the case of British military history because of the peculiar introversion of the British Army itself. The wars fought by the great continental powers, at least since the French Revolution, have been genuine “wars of nations” fought by peoples in arms, as often as not on their own soil. So were the great formative conflicts of the United States – the War of American Independence and the Civil War. In the two World Wars, the British Army did expand briefly to become “a people in arms,” but it did so reluctantly and inexpertly, and went back afterward to “proper soldiering” as soon as it decently could. It was a club, or rather a congeries of clubs, whose activities were a private matter and took place a long way from home.

Its historiographical tradition is that of regimental history writ large, a rather selective regimental history at that. The regimental historian – and I have been one myself, so I should know – is expected to chronicle triumphs, not disasters. His purpose is morale building, not dispassionate analysis, which rather limits its didactic value.

Furthermore, one would not learn from most histories of the British Army that, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, one of its major functions was repressing social conflict within the United Kingdom or, in the twentieth, policing Ireland. Accounts abound of colonial or imperial conflicts overseas, but few deal with the most remarkable achievement of the British Armed Forces: getting to where they had to fight, wherever it might be in the world, and remaining there. The amazing logistic network created primarily by the Royal Engineers, the ports, railroads, and depots that provided the skeleton of the British Empire, the feats of exploration and cartography that put so much of India, Africa, and the Middle East quite literally on the map—none of this was chronicled by Fortescue or indeed, as far as I know, by anyone else until Daniel Headrick drew attention to it in his Tools of Empire written twenty years ago. If we are now beginning to learn more about the political and social context of the Army at home and its adjustment to the weapons revolution of the nineteenth century, much of this is due to the work of Hew Strachan and his fellow practitioners of what our American colleagues call the “New Military History.”

Before going any further, I must say a word about naval history. This is even more of a specialization than military history and remains shamefully isolated even from that. But naval history cannot be studied in isolation from maritime history as a whole – no naval historian can get very far without using the resources of the National Maritime Museum – and maritime history demands a grasp of very complex technologies that lie as far beyond the range of the average military historian as they do of his political and social colleagues.

But naval history has been distorted even more than has military history by parochialism and nationalism. Its study peaked at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as part of a general campaign of imperialist propaganda.

Indeed, until chairs of naval history were recently established at King's College London and Exeter University, the only relevant post in any British university was that of, significantly, “Imperial and Naval History” at Cambridge, and that has been sanitized for the last half-century by being held by a succession of highly respectable economic historians. But they could have done worse. Like maritime history as a whole, naval history is sterile unless studied in association with economic history. The emphasis laid on operational naval history by traditional British naval historians, the glorification of Nelson and his triumphant battles, is understandable; but as Julian Corbett (our finest naval historian, one who was neither a sailor nor a professional academic) pointed out, we cannot appreciate the importance of Nelson's victories unless we devote equal attention to the ten years of humdrum blockade and minor actions that followed his death.

In fact, the finest picture of British naval activities during the Napoleonic Wars that we have to date is that given in the superb novels of Patrick O'Brien. It remains a standing reproach to British historians that until very recently the best, if not the only studies of the economic dimension of the Napoleonic Wars, have been by foreign historians, Eli Hecksher the Swede and Francois Crouzet the Frenchman. We had to wait for Paul Kennedy's Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery to see the sweep of British naval history set in its appropriate economic context, and this pioneer work still awaits a successor.

In the era of so-called “limited wars,” it was possible to study military and naval operations in isolation, although even for that era it remained a pretty sterile and impoverished approach. But we should recall how comparatively brief, in the sweep of world history, that era was. I remember the amazement and amusement with which my colleagues in the Department of Classics at King's regarded me, when I rather naively asked them to tell me who were the major current authorities on warfare in classical antiquity whose help I should try to enlist. Any historian of the classical era, they explained kindly, had to be an authority on warfare: war was what the classical era was all about. I knew enough to avoid a similar humiliation at the hands of my medievalist colleagues, who would have told me the same about European history between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries.

As for the Renaissance, the late John Hale was already reminding us in his work how intrinsic a part warfare played in the molding of its entire culture. Only for three centuries of European history at the most, between the sixteenth to the nineteenth, was it possible to regard warfare as an intermittent activity, conducted by a class of specialists, that could be studied in isolation, before in the twentieth there dawned what has been called “The Age of Total War”; war not only total but global. In that century, war – preparing for it, waging it, deterring it – became a dimension of human history that no historian can neglect.

As Trotsky is alleged to have put it, “You may not be interested in war, but war is very interested in you.” The military historian can no longer write about it without understanding that “military history” is only one dimension of the history of war that is of little value if not studied in its social and political context. Today, even the most unregenerate of military historians feels uneasy unless his or her work is legitimized by the rubric “War and Society.”

The concept “War and Society” is as significant in its way as “War Studies.” If “War Studies” represented an attempt by military historians to extend their territory to cover the nonmilitary aspects of warfare, “War and Society” was the enterprise of social historians exploring the impact of war on the whole structure, initially on industrial and postindustrial society, but eventually on social development throughout the ages. Something of the kind had been pioneered in the early twentieth century by a few German historians like Werner Sombart and Hans Delbruck, but otherwise it had been widely neglected. It had no didactic value for military historians, while the first generation of British social historians was temperamentally hostile to the whole idea that war could have anything but a negative impact on the development of mankind. The overlap between these two approaches has been vast and immensely fruitful; but, for “War and Society” in particular, the catalytic moment was probably the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War in 1964 and the celebrations of that event in the media.

“Celebrations” is perhaps not the right word to describe the remorseless emphasis given at the time, and ever since, to the worst ordeals suffered by the British Army on the Western Front. In the eyes of the general public, the experience of the “Great War” is encapsulated in two words, “Somme” and “Passchendaele.” The reasons for fighting the war, and the fact that we actually won it, passed almost unnoticed. A suggestion that I made a few years later that the victorious “Battle of a Hundred Days” in 1918 was at least as deserving of national celebrations as the ordeals of the Somme sank. like the proverbial stone. Perhaps this was not to be regretted. Anything that diminished the mindless glorification of war was certainly to be encouraged, although I have observed very little of such glorification in my own lifetime.

But what needed to be recalled was not so much the operational events of the war, whether triumphant or disastrous, as the social mobilization of the entire community; the massive and willing national participation in the war effort; and the birth, if only through an accumulation of individual tragedies across barriers of class and wealth, of a new sense of popular self-consciousness that transformed British, and indeed, European society. The proliferation of work published during the past forty years, in this country and in Germany, in particular, has shown how successfully the concept of “War and Society” has extended its sway in the academic, if not yet the popular, mind.

I discovered this – if I may again be self-referential – when I was commissioned by the Oxford University Press to contribute a volume on the First World War in their series of “very short introductions” to such enormous subjects as philosophy, religion, or art. I was asked to submit a synopsis to be sent to anonymous referees, and their comments were revealing. What, they asked, was I going to say about civil-military relations? About high and low culture?

About industrial mobilization? About the changing role of women in belligerent societies? About the historiography of the war and its reflection of national bias?

About the function of war in catalyzing revolution? About the memorialization of the war? About the development of mass media and its influences on public opinion?

All this was very helpful but a little bewildering, given that I had only 40,000 words to play with. Fortunately, cutting through this clamor of advice, I seemed to hear the voice of Charles Webster thundering “It's a book about war, isn't it? So write about the War!” So I did.

The comments of the referees were gratifying in that they showed how widely accepted the concept of “War and Society” has now become. But they also illustrated what might be termed a kind of historiographical “flight to the suburbs.” A populous and lucrative industrial estate has grown up around the old center of military history, populated by social and economic historians who – rather like the inhabitants of Los Angeles – feel no necessity to visit that center, and are barely aware that it exists. Their reluctance is not altogether surprising. For at least a generation, it was inhabited mainly by a sleazy and shifting population of popular and impressionistic writers of the “lions led by donkeys” school, earning a fast buck before going on to some more lucrative racket. They found it unnecessary to go through the tedious business of working from contemporary documents, analyzing the technical problems that staff officers and commanders in the field had to solve, and assessing in any scientific and scholarly fashion the causes of their success or failure.

Only gradually was the inner city reoccupied by serious professionals: Trevor Wilson and Robin Prior, preeminently; Tim Travers, Paddy Griffiths; Gary Sheffield, Ian Beckett: scholars patiently illuminating, by their detailed and well-documented studies, why the war was fought, and perhaps had to be fought, in the way that it was. Even so, the failure even by the most eminent of “general historians” of the war to take account of their work was starkly illustrated by Sir John Keegan's astonishing description of it as a “pointless waste.”

Nonetheless, if we are to understand why the war was such a catastrophe for the generation that fought it, why it bankrupted all its European participants and destroyed four empires, it is to the despised military historians that we have to turn. It was the demands of the military that resulted in the total mobilization not only of men, but also of industry and the transformation of the social order, whether peacefully or by violent revolution. Why did the military make such insatiable demands? Why were their expectations of a short war falsified?

Was there a “Schlieffen Plan,” and if so, why did it fail? Why were those huge battles on the Eastern Front so indecisive? Why were the attacks on the Western Front for long such bloody failures? Much can be made of the inexperience of the British High Command and the slowness of its “learning curve,” but why were the French no better? And if the Germans were better – as I think they were – then why was this so?

The only way to answer these questions is to plough through the military documentation: the training manuals, the operational orders, the war diaries, the plans for operations as they developed at every level of command, the after-action reports, the organization of logistics, all the huge mass of paper always engendered by armies generally known as “bumf”; paper without which not a single soldier can be recruited, paid, fed, armed, trained, posted, punished, promoted, sent into battle, hospitalized if wounded, decorated if deserving, and buried with his next of kin informed, if he gets killed. Not all of this is necessary to the understanding of what happens in battle and why, but it helps, if only because it reveals the vast complexity of the conduct of war in the industrial age and the demands that the maintenance of even the most efficient armies made on the national economy. When the armies were not efficient – and the inefficiency of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian armies beggars belief – the sheer effort of their maintenance and replacement was enough to stretch their national economies beyond the breaking point. At least, it was if the war went on for long enough, as in 1914 to 18 it did. But why did it?

For the answer to these questions, we have to turn in the first place to the lowly military historians. They will start with the development of railways and telegraphs that made possible the deployment of Millionenheere, armies numbering millions, a development disastrously some fifty years in advance of that of the radio communications needed for the tactical control. of armies in the field. They will go on to describe the huge advantage given to the defense by the development of breech-loading firearms and the attempts to counter it by intensifying artillery fire. They will explain the problems to which this gave rise in coordinating fire and movement – the essence of all military operations – in the absence of reliable battlefield communications.

They will show how, on the Western Front, each side gradually learned from its mistakes, but often applied that learning only to find that its adversary had learned a little more. They will trace the evolution of weapons systems until by 1918 – on the Western Front at least – the war was being fought by armies using doctrines and techniques that would have been impractical and inconceivable four years earlier. It is only by studying this technical operational history in some detail that we can understand how this happened and answer the question, whether this transformation could have occurred any more rapidly and any more effectively than it did, and judge the performance of the high commands accordingly.

Any historian who tries to tackle the history of the war without first dealing with these basic questions is ill qualified for his task, to put it very mildly. War is too serious a business for its history to be tackled without first learning how to use the basic tools of the military historian. But we must go on to ask further questions for which these tools can provide little help.

Why did civil society respond so readily to the demands of the military and not collapse under the strain? Was blockade as effective a weapon as the British Admiralty had expected, and why was Germany able to withstand it for so long? How did the strain of operations affect the political and social structure of the belligerent powers? All these are immense questions that will occupy historians for many years to come. But they would not have even been raised if the war had not lasted for so many years, and only the military historian can explain to us why it did.

Interestingly, the same questions do not arise, or do not arise with the same urgency, when we consider the Second World War. That war itself did not transform the belligerent societies that were fighting it. In the First World War, the defeat of the Habsburg and Russian Empires can be attributed directly, and that of the Hohenzollens indirectly, to the strain on their economies. There were no “decisive battles” in the First World War – not even Tannenberg. The outcome of the so-called “battles” on the Western Front – Verdun, the Somme, Passchendaele – still has to be judged in terms of the grisly statistics of attrition.

But that did not apply in the Second World War. It was defeat in the field that destroyed both the Nazi and Japanese Empires, not internal revolution. Both remained politically intact to the bitter end. Military victory, if anything, strengthened the political systems of the victorious powers, Soviet communism and Anglo-American democracy. Britain certainly emerged impoverished, but with its parliamentary system intact, and from the perspective of half a century it is hard to believe that the two most evident results of the war – the growth of social democracy at home, the loss of Empire abroad – were anything more than the acceleration by a few decades of long-term and inescapable trends. As a result, we do not have to study that war in such depth as we do the First World War if we are to understand its outcome: the military historians can on their own provide us with very satisfactory answers. The Blitzkrieg of 1940, the Battle of Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic, Japan's conquest of Southeast Asia, the great naval battles in the Pacific, the bombing offensive against Germany, the Normandy landings, and above all, the German invasion of the Soviet Union and its repulse – these were the events that cumulatively determined the outcome of the war, and they were undoubtedly events military historians are most competent to analyze and describe. Military history is inescapably the core of the history of the First World War. For that of the Second World War, it must be dominant.

Where operational history is dominant, so also is the element of the contingent, the counterfactual, something that most historians prefer to consign to the most obscure pornography shelves. Whether they are right to do so is perhaps debatable. Maybe we should consider legalizing it for personal use, in private, among consenting adults, and under strict medical supervision, if only because, for military historian at least, the temptation to take an occasional snorter is sometimes overwhelming. My own obsession, I must admit, is 1940. What if Göring had not prematurely switched the Luftwaffe from tactical to strategic targets, from airfields to ports and cities, thus leaving radar installations intact and giving Fighter Command a chance to recover? What if Hitler had not abandoned “Operation Sealion” and given priority instead to the invasion of the Soviet Union? What would have happened if Germany had successfully invaded the United Kingdom? What, not least, important, would have happened to me?

How far the history of either world war is relevant to the conduct of present or future wars is for our colleagues in staff colleges to discuss. They will probably prefer to dig deeper into the past to find relevant wisdom. The Russian conquest of the Caucasus? Britain's campaign on the Indian Northwest Frontier and Afghanistan? The American pacification of the Philippines? Perhaps even the Third Crusade? I would prefer to not speculate. I can only reemphasize my message, that despite the flight to the suburbs, despite the growth of “war studies” and “war and society”—a growth that I have myself done my best to stimulate and encourage, and whose growth I regard with some parental pride—at the center of the history of war there must lie the study of military history—that is, the study of the central activity of the armed forces, that is, fighting.