Battlescapes

The Impact of Terrain on War and Military Strategy

Ian D Rotherham, Ian D. Rotherham

• Publisher: Pen and Sword Military
• Year: 2024
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781399066136
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This comprehensive study explores the landscapes and heritage of past conflicts along with defensive and offensive structures. Throughout history, nature – its resources, landscape and terrain – has shaped the tactics of warfare and determined its outcomes. From the medieval English Fens to the 20th century Iraqi Marsh Arabs, landscapes have fostered resistance and dissention. Harnessed by people under threat the landscape has influenced strategies and tactics. Water and wetland halted campaigns in the Florida Everglades and in the Franco-Prussian War of the late 1800s. In the Second World War the Dutch flooded the drained polders to halt the Nazi advance and in 1938 the Chinese nationalist forces breached the flood-dykes of the Yellow River to halt the Japanese advance. Mountain ranges and deserts have long provided landscapes for resistance fighters. From the former Yugoslavia to Afghanistan these gnarly battlescapes traverse time and space. Libyan fighters held off invading Italian forces by operating from the caves and valleys of the Green Mountains and the Welsh defended their mountainous principalities against the Angevin Normans. The landscapes and heritage of past conflicts, defensive and offensive structures, and much more are brough together in this comprehensive study.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preamble
• Chapter 1: Introduction to landscapes of resistance
• Chapter 2: Nature, natural resources, and conflict
• Chapter 3: Landscapes and resources, twin elements of war
• Chapter 4: Terrains of conflict, assault, and defence
• Chapter 5: The impacts of disease and infection
• Chapter 6: Water and wetlands
• Chapter 7: Heaths, moors, and commons
• Chapter 8: Mountains and other barriers
• Chapter 9: Deserts and plains
• Chapter 10: Forests and woods
• Chapter 11: Airfields
• Chapter 12: Peatlands in the European theatre of war
• Chapter 13: Key issues of terrain and natural resources
• Chapter 14: Disease, landscape, and conflict
• Chapter 15: Dissention and non-conformity
• Chapter 16: Review and contemporary issues
• Bibliography and recommended reading