European Armies and the Conduct of War

Hew Strachan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9781138129917
• eBook ISBN: 9781134898206
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Discussing the key issues of modern warfare, Hew Strachan's work examines the theory and practice of land warfare in Europe since 1700.

Looking at warfare in the context of social and political change, Dr. Strachan interprets his subject matter as widely as possible, and European Armies and the Conduct of War considers the roles of air power and the impact of the United States on European military developments.

Through the eyes of the major theorists of the day, European Armies examines:

* how the social and political influences which shape armies, also mould the attitude of those armies to warfare
* the story of techicnal innovation
* the mounting pace of industrialization and its impact of warfare.

Recent military history has tended to focus on the relationship between armies and society and there has been much original research on the subject of the conduct of war. This book brings these approaches together, providing information and insight vital to the study of this fascinating era.

Chapter 1

The Study of War

The moderns, who have undertaken to write the history of different wars, or of some renowned Commanders, being chiefly men of learning only, and utterly unacquainted with the nature of military operations, have given us indeed agreeable, but useless productions.’ Thus did Henry Lloyd, a Welshman who had achieved general’s rank in Russian service, commence his History of the Late War in Germany, published in 1766. What Lloyd was anxious to do was to point to the distinction between the didactic function of the study of warfare and the purely historical. For him the pre-eminent examples of the first category were the ancients, Xenophon and Caesar, but it has remained the dominant trait in military historical writing up until our own times. In 1925 another major-general, J.F.C.Fuller, concluded from his study of light infantry in the eighteenth century that ‘Unless history can teach us how to look at the future, the history of war is but a bloody romance.’

The argument for the didactic use of military history does not therefore simply spring from a liberal horror of a subject outwardly so obscene. It is also profoundly utilitarian. The permutations of war are infinite, but each soldier’s personal experience of combat is likely to be very limited. For every grognard who marched from Rivoli to Waterloo, for every Thomas Atkins who fought from Dunkirk to Berlin, there have been many more whose military service has coincided with long periods of peace or with little more than a brief period of bush-fighting. Real soldiering for some professionals in the Second World War was the return to coping with the boredom of cantonment life in India. So, if the potential warriors of the future are to gain any knowledge of war before they encounter the reality or if they are to enlarge on their limited stock of actual experience, the only means available for them to do so is vicarious. They must perforce read military history.

The profession to which they belong is not, however, primarily a literate or an academic one. Its attraction to a young man is the challenge of outdoor life not that of desk-bound theory. Thus wide reading must be replaced by succinct and readily assimilable analysis. To this end the didactic tradition in military history has endeavoured to establish a number of immutable principles of war. They serve as a check-list for a subaltern suddenly faced with the command of a company or as a vade-mecum for the staf f college candidate battling his way through seemingly irrelevant detail in campaign histories. A rough check-list would include the following:

1. The object, the need to select the primary target and not to be deflected from that aim.
2. The offensive, which is the stronger form of warfare as it affirms morale and only it can lead to victory. The defensive is weaker because it disperses resources, yields the initiative to the enemy, and is therefore acceptable only as the prelude to a counterattack.
3. Security of forces, the importance of keeping up a guard while delivering the blow, of protecting one’s own communications while falling on those of the enemy.
4. Surprise, whether physical or psychological, in order to ensure moral superiority over the enemy. This is clearly related to the second principle.
5. Concentration, or bringing the mass of troops to bear on the decisive point.
6. Economy of effort. Notwithstanding the fifth principle, the commander must also judge the upper limit required, since there is little point in taking a sledge-hammer to swat a fly.
7. Flexibility and mobility, which are important elements in attacking with surprise, in concentrating decisively, and with no more effort than is requisite.
8. Simplicity of plan, since excessive complexity may overtax the training, capability and command structure of the forces and thus carry its own risk of breakdown.
9. Unity of command, thus ensuring the co-operation of the various parts of the army.
10. Morale, without which no troops will carry out even the best plans.

These maxims are designed for the purpose of training soldiers, but it remains important that the historian should be aware of them. In the first place, although there are innumerable exceptions to each one, used with judgement they can aid an understanding of war. It is their slavish application that is dangerous. Secondly, and more to the point for the purposes of this book, their establishment and reinforcement have been a primary purpose of many of the great theorists of war. Thus at the very least they provide an insight into the military brain.

Most writers on strategy have looked for general principles, trying to establish broad theories of universal application. But this is where the didactic use of military history begins to present problems. In many countries, particularly before 1914, the research and writing of military history were in the hands of specialist sections of the general staff. Although in some cases this arrangement did serve the purposes of scholarship, its justification was unashamedly didactic. As members of an organisation that needed to reinforce its own institutions and esprit, such historians inevitably started with more than the average number of preconceptions. As General Bronsart von Schellendorf pointed out, ‘It is well known that military history, when superficially studied, will furnish arguments in support of any theory or opinion.’

This tendency to systematise, or to try to fit the facts into a preconceived and universally applicable explanation, reached its most idiosyncratic and damaging levels not in the works by teams of general staff historians but with those of individuals. Jomini, whose Précis de l’art de la guerre (1838) will be discussed in more detail later in this book, was on the whole accurate in his observation of the campaigns of Napoleon, but, because he wished to fit them into an eighteenth-century model of limited warfare, completely misunderstood their spirit. Furthermore the uncritical adoption of his rules—in the erroneous belief that they were also Napoleon’s—to totally different conditions, could result only in disaster. The predecessors of Ulysses S. Grant in the commands of the Union armies in the American Civil War had received a full diet of Jomini at West Point. Grant said of them that They were always thinking about what Napoleon would do. Unfortunately for their plans the rebels would be thinking about something else. …If men make war in slavish obedience to rules, they will fail. …While our generals were working out problems of an ideal character…practical facts were neglected.’

Similarly Sir Basil Liddell Hart’s Strategy. The Indirect Approach was a conscious reaction to the excessively direct approach of the western front in 1914–18. He influenced a later generation of soldiers as profoundly as had Jomini. He argued that by attacking on the line of so-called ‘least expectation’, the general will always succeed and probably do so at little cost in lives. But the line of least expectation may in fact be that of supposed greatest expectation. For example, a direct assault could be mounted after the enemy has been temporarily distracted by a diversionary attack to his flank and rear. Or again, the line of least expectation may be just that because it does not threaten any object of decisive importance for the enemy. Not only is Liddell Hart’s argument tortuous in its logic; it is also selective in its history. Sherman’s Atlanta campaign of 1864 was taken as a classic example of the indirect approach, with its succession of turning movements in a fresh theatre of operations. But it was also total war, involving the destruction of crops and Southern farmsteads. Liddell Hart found difficulty in accepting that the indirect approach could by its attack on the civil population thus be even more horrific than any conventional military operation.

For not only he and Jomini, but also a host of other systematisers, have been drawn into attempts to rationalise war because they find difficulty in accepting the elemental forces at its centre. They have attempted to argue that war can be limited of itself, that its conduct can be moderated. At first sight this seems puzzling. There is nothing inherently limitable in violence. For an individual killing and maiming are extremes, and even for a state to pull its punches is to court that one thing more terrible than victory—defeat.

The influence of their general theories has coincided with periods of so-called limited war, or eras when Europe has drawn breath and taken stock after punishing and exhausting campaigning. Historically, three periods of limited war are normally identified in modern times. The first runs from 1648, the Peace of Westphalia and the end of the Thirty Years’ War, to 1792 and the onset of the Revolutionary Wars. Europe in the eighteenth century is taken to have an advanced international system, bound together on the one hand by dynastic monarchies, which respected each other’s constitutional positions, and on the other by nobilities, affiliated to these royal courts, and united by the spirit of reason, by the Enlightenment and by the international dominance of the French language. Religion ceased to be a casus belli, and thus an incentive for extremism was removed. There had been no logical limits when a man was fighting for his beliefs, convinced that he possessed a monopoly of the truth. But now violence became socialised: man fought as a member of a nation state. During the seventeenth century the central administration of armies took hold—military secretariats were established in France in 1635, in Austria in 1650, in Britain in 1661 and in Piedmont in 1717. War therefore became an activity regulated by the state. Raison d’état could act as a moderating influence. But in 1789 the French Revolution transformed the state from within and released the violent feelings of nationalism. Between 1792 and 1815 forces from outside the existing equation broke down the balance and inaugurated a period of total war. In 1815, at the Treaty of Vienna and by the Concert of Europe, Metternich and his ilk attempted to re-establish the old European order. So successful were they that although there were signs of breakdown after the 1848 revolutions—manifested in a number of European wars—it was not until 1914 that the old order of interrelated monarchies was swept away in a fresh bout of total war. The defeat of Germany in Hitler’s war inaugurated the third period. The world since 1945 has boasted some successes for the United Nations and has constructed an international system, which, although based on superpower rivalry and the threat of appalling devastation, has contrived to avert total war. But equally, like its predecessors, its strengths rest in the status quo. It is most vulnerable to forces from without, to the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the hands of those not aligned to the balance of East/West politics.

Even a chronology as superficial as the one given here suggests that it is not the theories of war that have limited the horrors of combat, but factors far more compelling, be they social, economic or political. A principal theme therefore of this book will be to examine the works of the better-known theorists of war and to explain their popularity in the context of the external constraints that have operated on war. To achieve this we must escape from the didactic tradition in military history and put war in its historical context. The development of war cannot be understood, as Jomini attempted to understand Napoleon, simply as a continuous, independent, self-generating growth, unaffected by external phenomena. Napoleon was a product of revolutionary France, and his methods of warfare were rooted in political and social change. Those origins gave his conduct of war a validity for his times only, and meant too that his campaigns can best be understood in their own chronological context. To approach the truth we must discard the military, telescopic perspective, which excludes extraneous factors, and instead think laterally.

In addition to a desire on the part of many theorists of war to rationalise and thus to limit, they have also agonised at length over whether the conduct of war constitutes an art or a science. Broadly speaking, at a tactical level, war needs to be as precise a science as possible. If a battalion, when it comes under fire, has a clear and exact procedure to follow, one in which all its constituent parts have been thoroughly trained, then it will gain time for the commander to take his decisions and it will give confidence to the men in their actions. The fact that Machiavelli in the sixteenth century and most military writers down to the eighteenth century reckoned warfare could be reduced to a science is not therefore simply a reflection of the age of reason. It also denotes the dominance of tactics in military thought, and in particular the importance of siegecraft, in itself one of the most exact procedures in battlefield techniques. But by the end of the eighteenth century, views were changing. Lloyd’s assertion that the art consisted in how to apply the rules of war in their correct combinations has found echoes ever since. The contribution of Behrenhorst (writing in 1797) and Clausewitz (whose Vom Kriege first appeared in 1832) may have been to stress the uncertainties and contradictions inherent in war, but they did not depart from the basic assumption that science provided the framework or the grammar of war, and art the genius of inspired command.

The evolution of the scientific aspect of war during our period has been affected by two interacting pressures. Both of them are major themes in this book. The industrial revolution and the advance of technology have transformed the mechanics of warfare. At the same time the bearing of arms in civilian life has all but disappeared, and thus the skills of the soldier have become more distinct. Professional armies prepare and train for war in peacetime. Their approach to these preparations is itself scientific, and the acquisition of the techniques of fighting widens the division between the bulk of society and the longservice regular soldier. Therefore, at this point the theorists’ semantic question as to whether warfare is a science begins to shed light on their concern with war’s limitation. A war fought by professional soldiers, because they are more costly to train and maintain, will in all probability be a war between smaller armies, with fewer consequent casualties and less impact on society as a whole. Therefore, writers like Liddell Hart have averred, a professional army is the desideratum because it will limit war. Such attitudes of course neglect the nature of the society from which the army is recruited, and the type of mission which its nation’s foreign policy is likely to require it to undertake. But if war is conducted by professionals in accordance with this thesis, it will also be more scientific because the level of military expertise will be higher and it will be more amenable to rational influences. Both Fuller and Liddell Hart embraced the mechanisation of armies after 1918 because it would reduce the element of chance. Tactically’, Fuller wrote, ‘the soldier is simply a weapon-mounting of about one-eighth h.p. energy.’

During our period, the direction of war at the level of art has been vested in commanders ever more removed from the battlefield. Marlborough contrived a remarkable independence of his political masters, but was eventually recalled. Today the major strategic decisions facing NATO to all intents and purposes lie with the President of the United States, a civilian politician. Generals, however senior, are excluded from a directing function at this level, and instead act in a merely advisory capacity. They are back to a position where the science of war, what is technically feasible, has become the prime military role. The art of war is a civilian task, not least because only thus will the political causes of war, and the political consequences that accrue from it, remain constant factors in its conduct. The relationship between politics and the waging of war is therefore another broad theme in this book.

As a technician, the soldier’s function is to warn of the enemy’s capabilities rather than his intentions. His professional role is in a sense a pessimistic one, to present a worst-case analysis which will ensure sufficient preparation to avert defeat and—ideally—to deter war altogether. But military preparations have been the most costly of state activities since budgets were first centralised. There is thus a conflict between what is strategically desirable and what is economically feasible. Decisions about enemy intentions have to be made if any check is to be enforced on the expenditure which their capabilities would seem to warrant. Strategy therefore concerns not only the relationship between war and politics but also that between war and cash. This is perhaps a subdivision of politics, since the revenue is raised by taxation, in its turn probably voted by a house of representatives. But it remains helpful to consider the economic constraints on military policy as a distinct pressure on the development of war’s conduct.

Mention has just been made of Clausewitz, and what has been written in this introduction reflects his influence. His contribution will not be analysed in detail until chapter 7, but what he wrote has provided a far more valuable framework for approaching the study of war than any comprehensive theories or list of principles. It is one of the greatest condemnations of the quality of military studies that, despite his imperfections and his inconsistencies, Clausewitz still stands unassailably supreme in military literature. Furthermore, this judgement applies not merely to what he had to say about the relationship between war and politics, but also to his view of the function of military history. Theory’, he wrote,

cannot equip the mind with the formulas for solving problems, nor can it mark the narrow path on which the sole solution is supposed to lie by planting a hedge of principles on either side. But it can give the mind insight into the great mass of phenomena and of their relationships, then leave it free to rise into the higher realms of action. There the mind can use its innate talents to capacity, combining them all to seize on what is right and true—as though it were a response to the immediate challenge more than a product of thought.

The theory thus applied must be developed from military history, and the latter must therefore be as detailed and accurate as possible. The first step, then, in Clausewitz’s development towards an understanding of war is a historical study that accords with the untrammelled demands of scholarship. If uncomfortable facts do not accord with theories, then it is not the facts that must be suppressed but the theory that should be revised. A purely academic approach to military history is therefore not only the key to Clausewitz’s arguments but also in fact the basis for its didactic use. Rigorous, honest and accurate reporting will provide a surer base for didactic military history than will the selective use of facts to buttress preconceptions. Thus, although the purpose of this book is purely academic, to seek greater understanding, it is not illogical to argue that, if the picture it presents contains an element of truth, it is also didactic.

Guide to Further Reading

The best history of war in Europe is Howard (1976): its only fault is its brevity. Other good general accounts are Ropp, and Preston, Wise and Werner. They too cover a wide span in a short compass. Delbrück’s magisterial work is now being translated: unfortunately it stops short of the First World War. Earle is still the best book on its subject, although some of the later chapters (particularly that on Liddell Hart) are now dated. For factual summaries of campaigns, go to Dupuy. Fuller (1972) is polemical.

The relationships between armies and their parent societies are covered by two excellent works, Corvisier for the period before 1789 and Gooch (1979) for the period after. The Fontana History of War and European Society promises to have a broader and more general remit, but so far only the volumes by Best (1982) and Kiernan (1982) have appeared. Many of the works Gooch cites in his full bibliographical guide have been of value in the writing of this book. But there has been no attempt in the Guides to Further Reading or in the Select Bibliography to give full coverage to the same ground, and the interested reader should therefore refer to Gooch.

In any case, the plea to put military history in its social context has been so successful that many histories of individual armies do not give adequate coverage to tactical and operational problems. The works of Carrias on the French and Germans are therefore still important, and Andolenko has proved helpful on the Russians. Splendid examples of what might be achieved are provided by Weigley (1968 and 1973) for the United States, and Papke and Petter for Germany.

The themes of militarism, the mass army and war’s relationship to economic development have been given general treatments by Vagts, Nickerson and Nef respectively. All three are somewhat dated, but Vagts and Nef in particular repay reading. William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power; Technology, Armed Force, and Society since AD 1000 (Oxford, 1983) and Maurice Pearton, The Knowledgeable State: Diplomacy, War and Technology since 1830 (London, 1982) provide sophisticated discussions of war and technology. Van Creveld (1977) has dealt with supply, but he tends at times to overstate his case. Shaw, although ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Maps and Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Epilogue
• Select Bibliography
• Supplementary Bibliography