H. Curling, ed., Recollections of Rifleman Harris (London 1929)
J. D’Arcy Dawson, Tunisian Battle (Macdonald, London 1943)
‘D. Donovan’, Once a Warrior King (first publ. 1985, Corgi edn, London 1987)
K. Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem (PL Poetry, London 1946)
J. W. Fortescue, ed., Memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne, 1812–13 (London 1926)
G. R. Gleig, The Subaltern (first publ. 1825; Dent edn, London n.d. 1949?)
M. Glover, ed., A Gentleman Volunteer, the letters of George Henell from the Peninsular War, 1812–13 (London 1979)
P. Griffith, ed., Wellington – Commander (Bird, Chichester 1985)
H. Guderian, Panzer Leader (trans C. Fitzgibbon, new edn, London 1979)
Gurwood, ed., The Dispatches of the Field Marshall the Duke of Wellington (London 1835)
I. Hamilton, A Staff Officer’s Scrap Book during the Russo-Japanese War (2 vols, London 1905)
N. Hamilton Montgomery, vol. I, The Making of a General (3 vols, Hamish Hamilton, London 1981–6)
W. V. Herbert, The Defence of Plevna 1877 (London 1895)
M. Herr, Dispatches (Picador edn, London 1978)
Horrocks, Corps Commander (first publ. 1977, Magnum edn, London 1979)
S. Jary, 18 Platoon (Sydney Jary, Carshalton Beeches, Surrey 1987)
J. Joffre, Mémoires du Maréchal Joffre, 1910–17 (2 vols, Plon, Paris 1932)
G. Johnson and C. Dunphie, Brightly Shone the Dawn, some experiences of the invasion of Normandy (London 1980)
E. Jünger, The Storm of Steel (R. H. Mottram, ed., London 1929)
J. Kincaid, Adventures in the Rifle Brigade (J. Fortescue, ed., London 1929)
H. Kippenberger, Infantry Brigadier (new edn, London 1961)
B. H. Liddell Hart, ed., The Letters of Private Wheeler (Joseph, London 1951)
M. Lindsay, So Few Got Through (London 1946)
K. Macksey, Armoured Crusader (Hutchinson, London 1967)
E. von Manstein, Lost Victories (first publ. 1955, translated Methuen, London 1958)
Martin, Souvenirs d’un Ex-officier, 1812–15 (Paris 1867)
R. Mason, Chickenhawk (first publ. 1983, Penguin edn, London 1984)
J. J. Mearsheimer, Liddell Hart and the Weight of History (Cornell University, New York 1988)
F. W. von Mellenthin, Panzer Battles (trans Betzler, Cassell, London 1955 and Oklahoma University 1956)
B. Montgomery, El Alamein to the River Sangro (first publ. 1948, Grey Arrow edn, 1960)
B. Montgomery, Normandy to the Baltic (Hutchinson, London 1946)
G. Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Penguin edn, London 1966)
D. Proctor, Section Commander (privately publ., Camberley 1989)
B. H. Reid, J. F. C. Fuller, Military Thinker (Macmillan, London 1987)
J. Reid and J. H. Eaton, The Life of Andrew Jackson (ed. F. L. Owsley Jr, University of Alabama 1974)
E. Rommel, Infantry Attacks (trans G. E. Kiddé, US Marine Corps Association, Quantico Va. 1956)
L. de Saint-Pierre, ed., Les Cahiers du Général; Brun de Villaret, Pair de France, 1773–1845 (Plon, Paris 1953)
H. W. Schmidt, With Rommel in the Desert (Harrap, London 1951)
H. T. Siborne, Waterloo Letters (London 1891)
W. Surtees, Twenty-Five Years in the Rifle Brigade (first publ. 1833, Military Book Society reprint, London 1973)
R. Trevelyan, The Fortress, a Diary of Anzio and After (Penguin edn, London 1979)
A. J. Trythall, ‘Boney’ Fuller; The Intellectual General (London 1977)
General Veron, Souvenirs de ma Vie Militaire – Impressions et Réflexions (Maugard, Rouen 1969)
J. W. Ward, Andrew Jackson, Symbol for an Age (Oxford University Press, New York 1962)
J. Wardrop, Tanks Across the Desert (ed. G. Forty, Kimber, London 1981)
M. Warner, Joan of Arc (Penguin, London 1983)
G. Wilson, If You Survive (Ballantine-Ivy, New York 1987)
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Combat Fiction – A Few Personal Perspectives
The Nineteenth Century
It is a pity that Wellington’s infantry has been rather badly served in fiction, possibly because it came just a little too early for the great expansion of the novel during the nineteenth century. In modern times there has been no equivalent, for Napoleonic land warfare, to Patrick O’Brien’s excellent tales of Nelson’s navy. I am reliably assured that the genre picks up nicely a little later in the century with the Flashman series – although I fear that I have not yet made the aquaintance of that particular officer.
To understand the literary basis for the nineteenth century’s view of battle, Tolstoy’s War and Peace should be read in conjunction with Sir Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953), and Georg Lukács’ The Historical Novel (1937, trans 1962). Tolstoy’s The Raid offers an early vision of ‘the Russian way of war’, while Zola’s La Débâcle gives an all too classic picture of ‘the French way’ (based on a meticulous reconstruction of Sedan). Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage puts inspiration from both Zola and Tolstoy into an American Civil War setting, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness draws inspiration from Crane in turn, with a bleak picture of colonial asset-stripping that must be set beside C. S. Forester’s The Sky and the Forest.
Captain ‘Danrit’s’ La Guerre de Demain is a technically thorough piece of science fiction mixed with revanchist politics, while Viollet le Duc’s Annals of a Fortress (trans Bucknall, London 1875) is a charmingly fictionalised summary of the history of fortress warfare. But see I. F. F. Clarke’s Voices Prophesying War (Oxford University, 1966) for a discussion of the whole genre of such future military histories, from Chesney, Verne, Robida and Wells right through to the perennial post-nuclear survival stories of the present day.
The World Wars
Maurice Genevoix’ Ceux de 14 and George Blond’s La Marne are French equivalents to Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914. C. S. Forester’s The General looks at a somewhat later stage of the war, as does the whole corpus of trench horror literature, from E. M. Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front onwards. In The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford UP, 1975) Paul Fussell goes far towards explaining the literary conventions behind these novels and memoirs, although he misses the way in which Remarque’s message was twisted into a new mould by such populist story tellers on the Second World War as Sven Hassel and ‘Leo Kessler’.
My personal favourites include Ernest Hemingway’s military-based novels – A Farewell to Arms, For Whom The Bell Tolls, and Over the River and Into the Trees. See also his well-chosen anthology of war stories, Men at War (Fontana edn, London 1966). Fred Majdalany’s Patrol is a neglected masterpiece describing British infantry fighting during the doldrums of the Second World War, comparable in its way to Evelyn Waugh’s more celebrated Officers and Gentlemen. Kenneth Macksey’s Battle is a splendidly detailed and analytical low-level analysis of a ‘typical’ bocage fight in Normandy, 1944; while Len Deighton’s Declarations of War, no less than his other Second World War fiction, is better than much of the other writing in a similar vein. Unlike any of these, Richard Cox’s Sealion is based not upon a battle that actually happened, but is surely unique in following the course of a war game about a battle that might have been …
Wars Since 1945, and Into the Future
Many Vietnam novels have appeared – particularly in the last few years – accompanied by almost as many Vietnam-related films as there once were Westerns. Unfortunately I stopped following them all as soon as the first edition of the present book had appeared in 1981, so I am badly out of date. Before that time I had found the following books particularly memorable: R. J. Glasser’s medical view in 365 Days; T. O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone; and especially James Webb’s Fields of Fire. Of the films, my favouri
te is still The Green Berets, for the simple reason that it was made at the time and partly in Vietnam itself. It seems to me to possess a subtle documentary quality that has been overlooked, but which its successors lack – although of course the first two Rambos are also required viewing for every serious citizen of the modern world.
Vietnam was by no means the only limited war to be fought since 1945. Very many other ‘small’ or ‘cold’ wars have attracted literary or cinematographic treatments, including MASH, which purported to be about Korea, or The Virgin Soldiers about Malaya. Dozens of dime novels, video nasties and arcade games of every sort have more or less explicitly featured clashes between terrorists and straight guys, Cubans and Contras, Libyans and Chadians – or whatever. John Le Carré’s work stands as a sensitive monument to the way in which these subjects may properly be treated, but much of the remainder is dross.
When it comes to the future, General Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War paints a cautionary but ultimately quite optimistic picture of that over-reported future event, while both Shelford Bidwell’s NATO view of World War 3 and Ralph Peters’ deep insight into the Red Army are cautionary but pessimistic. Kenneth Macksey’s First Clash – Combat Close-up in World War Three is a detailed low-level view of how the Third World War will appear to Canadian mechanised infantry, and in common with the three aforementioned works is seriously written, by a soldier. It must be admitted, however, that the bestseller lists are otherwise littered with many stories about this war that make military-technical nonsense. I particularly savoured one such offering in which an unfortunate Russian armoured spearhead was told to clear the villages immediately to the West of its border a month before it launched its actual invasion, and then use them to stage dress rehearsals of its surprise attack – but keep it all secret from NATO throughout!
Appendices
I Glossary of Abbreviations and Technical Terms
ACAV Armoured Cavalry Assault Vehicle
AHG Archives Historiques de la Guerre
APC Armoured Personnel Carrier
ARA Aerial Rocket Artillery
ARVN Army of the Republic of Vietnam
BEF British Expeditionary Force
Corps de chasse Major British armoured formation to complete and exploit infantry breakthroughs in WWII battles
ECM Electronic Counter-Measures
EEL Empires, Eagles and Lions magazine
FEBA Forward Edge of the Battle Area
FOFA Follow On Forces Attack
FSB Fire Support Base
HE High Explosive
JRUSI Journal of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies
LZ Landing Zone
MACV Military Assistance Command, Vietnam
MG Machine Gun
Mobile Group Major Soviet armoured formation to complete and exploit infantry breakthroughs in WWII battles.
NCOs Non Commissioned Officers
NVA North Vietnamese Army
POW Prisoner of War
RPV Remotely Piloted Vehicle
SMG Sub Machine Gun
TRADOC Training and Doctrine Command (US Army)
USJ United Services Journal
II Levels of Action
(i) Strategic ‘National’ Strategy embraces a nation’s higher military and political objectives. These may well be global in extent, and diplomatic, ideological or economic, rather than military, in nature.
‘Theatre’ strategy includes the general planning and execution of policy within a particular theatre of war, quite possibly with more than one distinct battle front.
(ii) Operational The operational level of war is often referred to in the American military press as ‘the lynchpin between tactics and strategy’, but its more specific definition is currently a major point of debate. A general indication as to what is meant would perhaps include ‘the organisation of military movements for a series of battles on one particular front, usually involving more than one division.’
Operational manoeuvres close to the enemy were once called ‘Grand Tactics’, but this terminology tends to blur more modern attempts at definition.
(iii) Tactical Tactics include everything to do with actually fighting battles, especially within the division.
‘Minor tactics’ are the principles by which specifically small unit actions are fought, by platoons and companies.
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