History Lessons
Mini Teaser: Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 248 pp., $27.50.
Paul Kennedy, ed., Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 224 pp., $25.00.
It is not easy to learn from the past. This is a fact that historians, at least when they assume the overt role of educators, are inclined to keep to themselves. Given two or three hours a week to polish up the historical consciousness of their students, even the most circumspect professionals are unlikely to emphasize the enormous concentration their discipline requires, or to admit that a lifetime of study can yield insights whose instrumental value may seem limited compared to those claimed by the social and natural sciences.
It is one of the many merits of Michael Howard's The Lessons of History that it makes no bones about the difficulty of what it is trying to do. The volume brings together thirteen characteristically elegant essays written between 1980 and 1989 during the author's tenure as Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. The first and last, his inaugural and valedictory addresses, deal with how history should be studied, and why it should be taught. Those in between focus on problems in the history of war and international relations in the modern era. Some take specific episodes as their point of departure--the Anglo-German arms race that preceded the First World War, for instance. Others examine issues of the broadest scope--the consequences of nationalism for international life is a recurrent theme, as is the impact of war on the societies that fight them. All are animated by Howard's conviction, as he says in a brief introductory note, that historical study is essential "in training not only political but ethical judgment." In the end, the lessons he would draw from the past are those of the examined life itself: intellectual humility, skepticism of cant and received opinion, sympathy for other points of view, and a firm commitment to the kind of open society that makes these virtues possible.
The pieces assembled in Paul Kennedy's Grand Strategies in War and Peace have a more pragmatic but no less useful purpose: to probe those characteristics of "grand strategy" that exist at all times and places, in order to shed light on present conditions. The volume, which originated as a series of lectures to complement a course at Yale on the history of war, consists of case studies by eight contributors, each of whom examines the conduct of a particular European power. All share a common understanding of grand strategy as comprising not just war-making, but all the elements of policy that influence the strength of a state in relation to its neighbors. This conception binds the essays together, and gives the book cohesiveness despite its chronological range, which extends from Arther Ferrill's "The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire" to "The Evolution of Soviet Grand Strategy" by Condoleezza Rice. There is also a concluding essay, "American Grand Strategy, Today and Tomorrow," by the editor, in which he considers the lessons of the European experience for contemporary policy-makers.
By the end of the volume, careful readers will begin to feel a few tentative generalizations forming in the backs of their minds. Perhaps the most compelling is the degree to which alliances matter, even to the greatest of powers. This is a major theme in two-thirds of the essays, notably John Hattendorf's on British strategy in the War of the Spanish Succession, "Alliance, Encirclement, and Attrition," Eliot Cohen's "Churchill and Coalition Strategy in World War II," and Douglas Porch's "Arms and Alliances: French Grand Strategy and Policy in 1914 and 1940." All three emphasize the importance not just of having but of "managing" allies, which in these accounts is less a matter of binding them to your own interests than of recognizing the legitimacy of theirs.
Indeed one would be justified in concluding, on the evidence presented here, that the signal characteristic of the successful strategist at all times is empathy. After that, perhaps, would come patience. In the formulation of grand strategy, no feeling seems to be more corrosive than the belief that time is not on your side. This affliction binds statesmen across centuries, even under circumstances that could hardly be more different: it is difficult, for instance, to read Dennis Showalter's discussion of German strategy in the twentieth century ("Total War for Limited Objectives"), with its penchant for taking the bull by the horns at every opportunity, and not recall John Elliott's account of imperial Spanish policy three hundred years before ("Managing Decline") and the sad determination of the Count-Duke of Olivares to "die doing something"--a sentiment worthy of Ludendorff himself, not to mention Hitler.
When all is said and done, however, the natural divergence in the authors' points of view and the diversity of the events they survey make easy analogies impossible. Professor Kennedy's conclusions are correspondingly modest: America's strategic success will depend on having a broad appreciation of the resources that contribute to national strength, and on carefully reconciling the ends of policy with the means those resources can provide. That said, however, the "inordinate complexity" of actually doing this remains impressive to Kennedy. The last word thus goes to Carl von Clausewitz, the man quoted more often than any other in both these books, for whom, as Kennedy notes in his final paragraph, strategy was always an art, never a science.
All the essays in these volumes date from the 1980s. None is prophetic of recent events in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union, a fact Michael Howard takes rueful notice of in his introductory note. This lack of prescience, however, is probably just as well, since a few lucky guesses would only distract from the real goal of historical study as represented here, which is not to predict the future but to help us master it when it arrives. Certainly this sense of mastery has proven difficult to achieve in recent years. Thoughtful people today, not least those charged with the making of policy, often feel cut off from a "useable" past by the cataclysm of the world wars and the advent of nuclear weapons, which at times mock the ends and means of policy as traditionally understood. This feeling is not unprecedented, nor necessarily synonymous with intellectual infertility or political failure. It was shared, for instance, by people in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who created ideas from which the modern world still draws inspiration. They too looked back on a past dominated by religious war and political upheavals that they felt lucky to have survived and had no wish to repeat. Still, few individuals nowadays share the faith in progress that came to mark that earlier time. Hardly any would claim to find freedom in their alienation, and most would be glad to recover a stronger sense of the past if they could.
Nevertheless, we must be careful about envying those to whom history offers its lessons too easily. This cautionary note pervades Michael Howard's essays, particularly those--a half dozen or so--that deal in one way or another with the advent of World War I. As Howard demonstrates repeatedly, no generation of European soldiers and statesmen has possessed a livelier historical sense than those of that era. Educated in the confident empiricism of the late Victorian age, they believed the past, like nature, would yield up its secrets in proportion to the degree of orderly, scientific inquiry to which it was subjected. They had their assumptions, like everyone else, but they were not slaves to ideology. They lived, moreover, in societies where matters of war and peace were widely debated beyond the halls of government. Although pilloried in retrospect for their complacency, they were not insensitive to change. Many were concerned with how the astonishing social and technological developments of their own time would affect international relations and the conduct of war, and they looked to the past to help solve this problem. To Howard, indeed to anyone who believes in the value of history for politics, it is no laughing matter that such men should have presided over one of the great geopolitical catastrophes of modern times.
At the end of the nineteenth century, military professionals had reached a broad and dispiriting consensus on the nature of modern war. The root of the dilemma, as they saw it, was technological. The range and firepower of modern weapons insured that battles in the future would be fought over wide areas, by bodies of troops that, because of their size and the dispersal necessary to avoid their slaughter, would be difficult to control. Casualties would nevertheless be high, as would the consumption of ammunition and everything else that war devoured. These immense armies, moreover, would be made up chiefly of conscripts, whose determination and endurance were open to question. It was rightly feared that attacks would become bogged down under such conditions, that battles would become mere sieges, and that war would lose its decisiveness, and therefore much of its political value.
This analysis was not based on abstractions but, as Howard (seconded by Porch and Showalter in the Kennedy volume) makes abundantly clear, on a close study of war in the recent past. Although it is sometimes imagined that the men who fought the Great War were mesmerized by Germany's lightning triumph over France in 1870, this was not so. If anything, that exemplary demonstration of military efficiency by the Prussian General Staff lost its luster with the passage of time. Increasingly, it was not the rapidity of the German advance but the tremendous casualties incurred by every frontal attack that preyed on the minds of professional soldiers. As Showalter observes, even the architect of Germany's victory, Helmuth von Moltke, eventually came to doubt whether such success would ever be possible again. These apprehensions were strongly reinforced by the example of the American Civil War, with its seemingly endless campaigns of attrition, and later by the Boer War, which proved far longer and bloodier than earlier "colonial" conflicts.
Obviously the men of 1914 were far from indifferent to the historical facts. Yet it is equally obvious that they failed to interpret those facts correctly. Facts, after all, do not speak for themselves. Historical interpretation always involves the weighing of contradictory evidence, and in this respect the military and political leaders of that era may have fallen short. Too often the facts were filtered through a screen of professional arrogance and presumption thick enough to blind men to the evidence of their senses. Thus the perverse belief that machine guns would favor a mobile offensive, rather than a static defense, was undoubtedly based less on historical experience than on the need to find some talisman with which to dispel the specter of stalemate. Similarly, the conviction that the next war would be short--a commonplace in almost every age--had become an article of faith by 1914 not because history pointed that way but because it was the only kind of war anyone could imagine fighting on a rational basis.
It seems reasonable to conclude, in other words, that the professional obligation to make war--to preserve war's usefulness as an instrument of policy--finally prevailed in the face of mounting evidence of the futility this might involve. Europe slithered into war not because its leaders lacked historical knowledge but because the issues they faced were complex and the leaders lacked the intellectual detachment and emotional independence necessary to make proper use of the knowledge they had.
Fair enough, up to a point. In the end, however, we may wonder whether greater detachment and independence could really have saved them. Consider, for example, the European response to the Russo-Japanese War, to which Howard draws particular attention in his essay "Men Against Fire," which serves as a kind of center-piece to the present volume. The Russo-Japanese War began in February, 1904, and ended nineteen months later when Russia, beaten on land and sea, made modest territorial concessions to Japan and abandoned its expansionist policy in the Far East. It was a modern conflict in every sense, comparable in scale to European wars of the previous century, and fought with weapons and tactics similar to those employed in Europe ten years later. Its revolutionary consequences for Russia are well known, and on this account the war is commonly regarded as yet another harbinger of disaster that the statesmen of that era somehow contrived to misunderstand. As Howard points out, however, the war looked different to contemporaries than it does to us, and it is by no means easy to think of any historical arguments that might have set them straight.
The Russo-Japanese War confirmed some of the bleaker inferences European soldiers had drawn from the recent past. Pitched battles had invariably produced high casualties. Some had degenerated into lengthy trench campaigns recalling those of the American Civil War. The war had also gone on for what seemed a dangerously long time--serious fighting on land lasted thirteen months. On the other hand, the war also offered grounds for optimism. Despite heavy casualties, a number of frontal assaults had succeeded against entrenched opponents with modern weapons. A few had actually been driven home by bayonets alone--a fact that seemed noteworthy even when due account was taken of the superior discipline and cohesiveness that were already being attributed to the Japanese. Moreover, although the war had gone on too long, its indecisiveness was obviously connected to the endemic supply problems that had plagued both sides: the Russian and Japanese armies had fought at the ends of lines of communications far more extended than they could ever be in Europe. If those armies had enjoyed more direct and abundant logistical support, the decision would surely have come sooner. As it was, the war had still produced a clear winner, strategically and politically.
In short, as Howard demonstrates, the Russo-Japanese War helped Europeans resolve to their own satisfaction the worst ambiguities of recent military history. It contributed to the extraordinary emphasis on morale that dominated tactical thinking in 1914 and to the cult of the offensive that shaped the strategy of every belligerent. Even more tragically, it demonstrated the vital importance of keeping the engines of industrialized warfare well stoked with men and material in order to get the bloody business over with as quickly as possible. A few years later European armies would perform logistical prodigies that could scarcely have been imagined a generation earlier, and which would have inspired amazement even if they had not been so pointless.
This subsequent experience has made obvious the crucial defect in the contemporary understanding of the Russo-Japanese War: that conflict was not made longer or bloodier by poor logistics. If anything, the opposite was true: more plentiful supplies and reinforcements would almost certainly have lengthened the war and made it less, rather than more, decisive. Yet there are no historical precedents nor any form of historical analysis, however disinterested, that could have led to this insight. Anyone who had claimed in 1910 that "history showed" that excellent logistics would make the next war less decisive would have been regarded as sadly ill-informed--as he would today, for that matter.
In the final analysis, Howard's account suggests that the historical understanding of the men who made the Great War was compromised less by prejudice or undue selectivity than by their overestimation of what that evidence could teach them. Historical study seemed to them something like double-entry bookkeeping; it would yield the right answers if only they knew enough. It was the historian's responsibility to assign the correct value to each line in the ledger--no easy task, admittedly, but achievable given sufficient diligence and circumspection. The notion that the right evidence might not exist, and that the future was in the strictest sense incalculable, would have seemed quite naive.
The shallowness of this conception becomes even more apparent in light of Eliot Cohen's essay on Churchill. As Cohen shows, Churchill's skill in cultivating the Americans and the Russians and his conduct as a war leader generally were both shaped by a quarter-century of historical study, first for his multi-volume history of World War I, The World Crisis, and then for his biography of his great ancestor, Marlborough. Both works, Cohen observes, employ "the same themes and diction as the great state papers of 1940-1945." It was at least in part from them--that is, from the concentrated effort of historical reflection that they entailed--that Churchill acquired his uncanny ability to pick out "the two or three `supreme facts' governing a situation," and sharpened his sense of the "true proportion" of military and political events, which stayed with him even in the face of what most contemporaries regarded, not without reason, as unprecedented disasters.
The view of the past as a haphazard collection of useful precedents still dominates most peoples' common-sense impression of what it means to learn from history. The impression, however, is mistaken and in the long run it can only undermine our already fragile sense of community with earlier times: the past will lie to us, as it lied to our ancestors, so we will stop questioning it, having failed to notice that it is the questions, not the answers, that matter. History--deriving from the Greek word for "inquiry"--is not something you know. It is, like philosophy, something you do. Its hallmark, as Churchill knew as well as any professional scholar, is not memory, but curiosity. Despite its irreducible uncertainty, it remains indispensable to public life in a free society, not because a knowledge of the past promises a future free of risk, but because--as both these volumes illustrate so splendidly--the effort of historical understanding cultivates qualities of tolerance, objectivity, and dispassionate judgment that can only make the world a more decent and less dangerous place.
Daniel Moran teaches history at the University of Northern Colorado.
Essay Types: Book Review