Military history

• 1. Introduction

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  Military history claims over 180,000 articles in the largest open reference project online, yet inside the academic history profession it lives, in the words of one scholar, in an intellectual ghetto. William H. McNeill counted 144 books on the subject published between 1968 and 1978. He found they split cleanly into two camps. One was written by journalists and men of letters outside the universities. The other came almost entirely from within the military establishment itself. McNeill called the lack of interest among professional historians one of the strangest prejudices of the profession. How did a field with such public appeal end up an orphan among scholars? And how do historians reconstruct wars when the records were deliberately destroyed, or never written down at all? This is the study of armed conflict across human history, and of how war reshaped the societies, cultures, and economies that waged it.

• 2. Past Is Prologue

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  The Combat Studies Institute trains military history instructors under a single motto: Past is Prologue. Its certification work deliberately deemphasizes rote memorization of detail. Instead it focuses on themes and context, measured against current and future conflict. The point is practical. Military command studies the past so it does not repeat old mistakes.

  Commanders are meant to perceive historical parallels in the heat of a battle. The discipline is taught at academies and service schools precisely so officers can capitalize on lessons already learned. This applied purpose gives military history a restless, changing character.

  The field shifts as fast as the forces it describes. The frenetic pace of technological change during the Industrial Revolution drove much of that movement, and the nuclear and information ages pushed it further. One recent idea, the Revolution in Military Affairs, tries to explain how emerging technologies such as gunpowder reshape warfare. It describes short bursts of rapid change separated by stretches of relative calm, a rhythm that would soon define how new weapons entered the battlefield.

• 3. Reading Around The Lies

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  Battle descriptions written by leaders tend to minimize failure and exaggerate success. To correct for that bias, military history is periodized, and historians draw on every available source to reach an honest assessment. Historiographical analysis is the tool, used to produce an unbiased contemporary view of the records.

  Jeremy Black laid out the problems 21st-century military historians inherited from their predecessors. He named Eurocentricity, a bias toward technology, and a fixation on leading powers and dominant military systems. He pointed to the artificial separation of land, sea, and air conflicts, and an over-focus on state-to-state war.

  Greek fire remains a working example of the limits of method. Scholars still do not know its exact nature, because some records were destroyed and others were never written down as military secrets. Researching Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom posed the same trouble, with classified records deliberately destroyed.

  In the early 1980s, Jeffrey Kimball tested whether a historian's politics colored their interpretations. He surveyed 109 active diplomatic historians and 54 active military historians in the United States. He found their current political views moderately correlated with their readings of the past. Among military historians, 40 percent identified as Conservative and none as Socialist, while among diplomatic historians 53 percent were Liberal. All groups agreed on one proposition, that Americans have historically viewed national security in terms of extremes such as good versus evil.

• 4. The Field's Own House

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  Since 1937, academic historians of war have published The Journal of Military History through their own scholarly body, the Society for Military History. The journal runs four issues a year, carrying scholarly articles, book reviews, and a bibliography of new publications and dissertations. The Society counts 2,300 members, holds an annual convention, and awards prizes for the best work.

  University courses on the subject have stayed popular, often using films to humanize the experience of combat. Eugene P. A. Scleh, a history professor at the University of Maine, taught a course called Modern War and Its Images entirely through film. His students reported they found the documentaries more valuable than the dramas.

  Since 1993, one of the most popular online gathering points has been H-WAR, sponsored by the H-Net network at Michigan State University. It is free to join and counts over 4,000 members, run by six coeditors and an academic advisory board. The wider H-Net family of lists has published over 46,000 scholarly book reviews, a rhythm of daily moderated discussion that libraries could never match.

• 5. What Museums Won't Show

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  David Lowenthal observed that in today's museums, nothing seems too horrendous to commemorate. Yet Andrew Whitmarsh countered that museums frequently portray a sanitized version of warfare. War is seldom presented as a good thing, even as the soldiers who fought it are heavily praised. Curators still debate whether to show both the positive and negative faces of war.

  In 1995 the Smithsonian Institution planned to display the fuselage of the actual bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Japan. Veterans attacked the curators and historians, and the resulting national controversy led to the exhibit's cancellation.

  Military museums are usually organized from a national point of view, built around the conflicts a given country fought. They display weapons, uniforms, decorations, wartime propaganda, and exhibits on civilian life under fire. Some specialize tightly, like the Imperial War Museum Duxford for military aircraft, the Deutsches Panzermuseum for tanks, or the International Spy Museum for espionage. In the Dolomites of South Tyrol, the small n8bunker museum at Olang draws crowds to the Italian alpine wall. The U.S. Army and the state National Guards alone operate 98 military history museums across the country and three more abroad.

• 6. The First Witnesses

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  The Egyptian military scribe Tjaneni recorded the Battle of Megiddo in the 15th century BC, accepted as the first battle preserved in relatively reliable detail. Written documentation of conflict reaches back further still, to the clash between Upper and Lower Egypt around 3150 BC, and to Sumer and Elam near modern Basra around 2700 BC. Heroic epics like the Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer's Iliad are thick with military detail, though their historicity has been challenged.

  Herodotus, who lived from 484 to 425 BC, earned the title father of history with The Histories. Thucydides followed with the History of the Peloponnesian War. An Athenian himself, Thucydides used his exile to study the war from many sides, examining documents and interviewing eyewitnesses, and his impartiality set a standard.

  Xenophon, who lived from 430 to 355 BC, built his Anabasis around the analysis of a single leader, recording Cyrus the Younger's expedition into Anatolia. Julius Caesar, who lived from 100 to 44 BC, left memoirs of his own campaigns in the Commentarii de Bello Gallico and the Commentarii de Bello Civili. East of the Mediterranean, the Arthashastra in India and Sun Tzu's The Art of War in China set down strategic doctrine, while Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian described the Warring States and the Qin wars of unification.

• 7. When A Weapon Wins

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  A rule of thumb governs the arms race: if your enemy holds a potentially war-winning weapon, you must either match it or neutralize it. Chariots, which originated around 2000 BC, were the first to prove it. One man steered while a second archer loosed arrows, and the weapon became crucial to governments from the New Egyptian Kingdom to the Shang dynasty.

  Themistocles built up a Greek navy of 310 ships and defeated the Persians at the Battle of Salamis, ending the Persian invasion of Greece. Naval power often decided the rest. The first recorded naval battle came in 1210 BC, between the Hittite king Suppiluliuma II and Cyprus, which was defeated. In the First Punic War, Rome built a fleet in 261 BC and added the corvus, a boarding bridge that let soldiers storm enemy decks and won the Battle of Mylae.

  The English longbow, dating from the 12th century, dominated battlefields for over a century. It handed England an early advantage in the Hundred Years' War, on show at the Battle of Crecy and the Battle of Agincourt, even though the English were eventually defeated. Gunpowder evolved slowly from formulations by Chinese alchemists as early as the 4th century, beginning as experiments on life force and metal transmutation.

  Joseph Needham described the migration of these inventions in a single line: all the long preparations and tentative experiments were made in China, and everything came to Islam and the West fully fledged. Cannons first appeared in Europe in the early 14th century. The best evidence of the earliest gun in Europe is the Loshult gun, made of bronze and measuring 11.8 inches, which a modern replica fired up to 1,300 meters.

• 8. Drilling The Volley

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  Oda Nobunaga successfully implemented his volley technique in 1575, twenty years before any sign of it appears in Europe. Volley fire structured infantry into ranks that alternated between loading and firing, keeping up a steadier rate of fire and denying the enemy a chance to overrun the line during a reload. The first hints of the same countermarch drill in Europe came only in the mid-1590s, with Lord William Louis of Nassau.

  Korea may have reached the idea earliest of all. By 1447, King Sejong the Great had instructed his gunners to shoot their fire barrels in squads of five, taking turns firing and loading. The principle was tested in what Kenneth Swope called the First Great East Asian War, when Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who lived from 1537 to 1598, launched a failed six-year invasion of Korea. Japanese gunfire wiped out the curtain of arrows thrown up by Korean defenders, until Ming China helped push the invaders back in 1598.

  The Ming general Qi Jiguang supplied the original treatise that guided Korea's later reforms. He gave detailed instructions in small-group tactics, psychological warfare, and other modern techniques. Qi emphasized repetitive drilling and the separation of the strong from the weak, synthesizing small trained groups into larger companies and armies so they could operate, in his words, as eyes, hands, and feet.

  On the 17th of December 1903, the Wright Brothers made the first controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight, covering 39 meters. Aviation grew important during the First World War, when several aces gained fame. In 1911 an aircraft first took off from a warship, and the harder problem of landing on one drove the development of the aircraft carrier with its unobstructed flight deck.

  The French were first to introduce the armored car, in 1902, and by 1918 the British had produced the first armored troop carrier. In the First World War the British and French held a crucial advantage in tanks. The Germans fielded only a few dozen A7V tanks and 170 captured ones, while the Allies each had several hundred, including the 13-ton French Schneider CA1 with its 75 mm gun.

  Chemical warfare exploded into public consciousness in the same conflict. The Germans fired gas-filled shells at the Battle of Bolimov in January 1915, though those were not lethal. In April 1915 they used a highly lethal chlorine gas to moderate effect at the Second Battle of Ypres. Gas masks were invented within weeks, poison gas proved unable to win battles, and all nations made it illegal in the 1920s.

  The atomic bomb, built by the Manhattan Project, was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, quickly and controversially ending the Second World War. During the Cold War the main powers ran a nuclear arms race and a space race, racing to launch humans toward the moon. The nuclear submarine, invented in 1955, no longer needed to surface often and could run more quietly, evolving into the underwater missile platform that completed what became known as the nuclear triad.