A History of Warfare
Page 1
ACCLAIM FOR John Keegan’s
A
HISTORY
of
WARFARE
“A masterpiece … this is one of those rare books which could still be required reading in its field a hundred years from now.”
—The New Yorker
“A History of Warfare is an intellectual tour de force.… It is impossible in a brief review to convey [its] awesome sweep or the breadth and depth of argumentation … consistently stimulating and enlightening.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Compact yet encyclopedic … [Keegan’s] scheme reminds us that modernity is an eyeblink in history and that innovations mask continuities.… A History of Warfare is, in effect, a history of humankind.”
—Newsweek
“To write a history of warfare throughout the world in some 400 pages, and to include in it not merely a profound analysis of the nature of war but hundreds of striking examples of how it has been fought throughout the ages, is a formidable achievement. Moreover, John Keegan has accomplished this feat with a stylishness that makes this book a … profound experience to read. This work tells one not merely about war but about human nature in its darker aspects.”
—Paul Johnson, Newsday
“There is much in this book to praise.… A History of Warfare is the culmination of a scholarly career devoted to the martial heritage. Magisterial in tone, the book is also conceptually provocative and innovatively organized.… [Keegan] is an engaging and informative guide.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Absorbing.… In A History of Warfare, Mr. Keegan furnishes his readers with multiple intellectual dimensions, and makes it possible for us to learn from a variety of alternative military cultures. He writes persuasively.”
—The New York Times
“In this broad overview of the making of war from primitive times to the present … Keegan provides ample evidence that the advances of civilization not only provided more deadly means of making war, but created conditions that made warfare more deadly. [He] … has that wonderful command of his subject that involves the reader in his main argument while intriguing him with the unsuspected significance of seemingly minor details.”
—Boston Globe
“Keegan’s estimable work is ambitious.… [Keegan has written] a complete survey of organized armed conflict, from the beginning of written records to the atomic bomb. He accomplishes this feat with amazing dexterity.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“A brilliant feat of scholarly compression in which the author … deploys the fruits of forty years of research, teaching, and thought on the subject of war; I do not know a work in which such an encyclopedic range of military knowledge is so well arranged.… This is military history at its very best.”
—National Review
John Keegan
A HISTORY of WARFARE
John Keegan was for many years senior lecturer in military history at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and is now defense editor of the Daily Telegraph in London. He is the author or co-author of nine previous books.
ALSO BY JOHN KEEGAN
The Face of Battle
The Nature of War (with Joseph Darracott)
World Armies
Who’s Who in Military History (with Andrew Wheatcroft)
Six Armies in Normandy
Soldiers (with Richard Holmes)
The Mask of Command
The Price of Admiralty
The Second World War
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, NOVEMBER 1994
Copyright © 1993 by John Keegan
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Hutchinson, London, in 1993. First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1993.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Keegan, John, [date]
A history of warfare / John Keegan.
p. cm.
Includes the bibliographical references.
1. Military art and science—History. I. Title.
U27.K38 1993
355′.009—dc20 93-14884
eISBN: 978-0-307-82857-6
v3.1
In memory of Winter Bridgman
Lieutenant in the Régiment de Clare
killed at the battle of Lauffeld
July 2, 1747
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 War in Human History
Interlude: Limitations on Warmaking
2 Stone
Interlude: Fortification
3 Flesh
Interlude: Armies
4 Iron
Interlude: Logistics and Supply
5 Fire
Conclusion
References
Select Bibliography
Illustrations
Carl von Clausewitz (Hulton Deutsch)
Easter Island (Barnaby’s Picture Library)
Mameluke warrior (British Library)
Battle of the Pyramids (Robert Harding Picture Library)
Zulu warriors (Mansell Collection)
A Partisan’s Mother (Peter Newark’s Military Pictures)
Japanese swordsmen (Victoria & Albert Museum)
Mark IV Panzer (E.T. Archive)
Mountain infantrymen in the Julian Alps (Robert Harding Picture Library)
German infantrymen, 1942 (E.T. Archive)
Future Yanomamö warrior (Sue Cunningham Photographic)
New Stone Age hunters (Mansell Collection)
Egyptian archers (Peter Clayton)
Aztec warriors (British Museum)
Assyrian victors (CM. Dixon)
Sethos I (British Museum)
Palette of Narmer (Girauden)
Rameses II (British Museum)
Assyrian hunters (E. T. Archive)
Standard of Ur (British Museum)
Assyrian warriors (CM. Dixon)
Assyrians in battle (CM. Dixon)
Sarmatian warrior (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
Battle of Issus (CM. Dixon)
Iranian horsemen (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
Coming of the stirrup (E. T. Archive)
Walls of Jericho (British School of Archaeology, Jerusalem)
Great Wall of China (G & A Loescher/Barnaby’s Picture Library)
Hadrian’s Wall (Barnaby’s Picture Library)
Porchester Castle (Aerofilms)
Krak des Chevaliers (Aerofilms)
Siege of Limerick (Mansell Collection)
Zouaves (Mansell Collection)
Janissaries (Sonia Halliday)
Swiss militia (Popperfoto)
John Hawkwood (Mansell Collection)
The Village Recruit (Mansell Collection)
Conscripts, 1939 (Hulton Deutsch)
Greek armour (C.M. Dixon)
Hoplite (Mansell Collection)
Hoplites in battle (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
Roman warship (CM. Dixon)
Roman centurion (Mansell Collection)
Centurion (E.T. Archive)
Barbarian tribesman (Robert Harding Picture Library)
Frankish horseman (Robert Harding Picture Library)
Crusaders (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
Escalade used in a medieval siege (Hulton Deutsch)
Early cannon (E.T. Archive)
Gunpowder (E.T. Archive)
Knights of Malta (Robert Harding Picture Library)
The Great Harry (Mansell Collection)
Seventeenth-century Manual of Arms (Mansell Collection)
Siege cannon (M.A.R.S.)
Gunpowder mill (Mansell Collection)
Battle of Williamsburg (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
Cannon manufacture (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
Railroad construction (M.A.R.S.)
Krupp’s trial range (Mansell Collection)
British soldier at the Somme (E.T. Archive)
German Junkers dive-bombers (E.T. Archive)
Atlantic convoy (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
B-17s (M.A.R.S.)
Atomic bomb test at Bikini atoll (Peter Newark’s Historical Pictures)
Acknowledgments
Great changes have occurred in the world since I began this book in 1989, and those changes should be acknowledged first. The Cold War has ended. A brief but dramatic air and ground war has been fought in the Gulf. A protracted and cruel civil war has broken out and still rages in former Yugoslavia. Several of the themes developed in this book have revealed themselves — at least to me — in the Gulf and Yugoslav wars.
In the Gulf a Clausewitzian defeat was inflicted by the forces of the coalition on those of Saddam Hussein. His refusal, however, to concede the reality of the catastrophe that had overtaken him, by recourse to a familiar Islamic rhetoric that denied he had been defeated in spirit, whatever material loss he had suffered, robbed the coalition’s Clausewitzian victory of much of its political point. Saddam’s continued survival in power, in which the victors appear to acquiesce, is a striking exemplification of the inutility of the ‘Western way of warfare’ when confronted by an opponent who refuses to share its cultural assumptions. The Gulf war may be seen in one light as a clash of two quite different military cultures, each with deep historical roots, neither of which can be understood in terms of abstractions about the ‘nature of war’ itself, since there is no such thing.
The horrors of the war in Yugoslavia, as incomprehensible as they are revolting to the civilised mind, defy explanation in conventional military terms. The pattern of local hatreds they reveal are unfamiliar to anyone but the professional anthropologists who take the warfare of tribal and marginal peoples as their subject of study. Many anthropologists deny that there is such a phenomenon as ‘primitive warfare’. Most intelligent newspaper readers — on whom reports of ‘ethnic cleansing’, the systematic mistreatment of women, the satisfaction of revenge, the organisation of massacre and the voiding of territory then left unoccupied have made such an indelible impression — will be struck by the parallels to be drawn with the behaviour of pre-state peoples described in this book.
I am particularly grateful to Professor Neil Whitehead for the guidance he gave me in finding my way through the literature of the anthropology of warfare. The misunderstandings and misinterpretations that resulted are my own. The professional soldiers and military historians to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for my efforts to piece together a comprehensive picture of the forms warfare has taken across time and place are too numerous to mention. Not all may wish to be associated with such a personal view as the one I have come to hold. I should, however, like to remember my Balliol tutor, A.B. Rodger, who first taught me military history, Brigadier Peter Young, DSO, MC, head of the Department of Military History at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in which I first tried to teach the subject, and Dr Christopher Duffy, my Sandhurst colleague, whose deep knowledge of Habsburg and Ottoman military history first alerted me to the idea that warfare is a cultural activity.
I am deeply grateful to Elisabeth Sifton, my American editor, for the work she did on the manuscript, to my English editor, Anthony Whittome, for the meticulous care he has taken in turning it into a printed book, to Anne-Marie Ehrlich for once again assembling illustrations, to Alan Gilliland for devising and drawing the maps, to Frances Banks for typing from my increasingly difficult handwriting and, as always, to my literary agent, Anthony Sheil, a friend of thirty years. I particularly wish to thank Andrew Orgill and his staff at the Central Library, Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, one of the great military libraries of the world to which I am lucky enough still to be allowed access, the staff of the Ministry of Defence Library and the staff of the London Library.
I owe personal thanks to many friends at The Daily Telegraph, including Conrad Black, Max Hastings, Tom Pride, Nigel Wade — who arranged for me to visit the Gulf in November 1990 and Yugoslavia between the Croatian and Bosnian wars — Peter Almond, Robert Fox, Bill Deedes, Jeremy Deedes, Christopher Hudson, Simon Scott-Plummer, John Coldstream, Miriam Gross, Nigel Horne, Nick Garland, Mark Law, Charles Moore, Trevor Grove, Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd, Andrew Hutchinson and Louisa Bull.
My brother Francis, by his interest in the history of our mother’s family, the Bridgmans of Toomdeely, has established our relationship with several soldiers who went from Ireland to fight for France in the wars of Louis XV. As one of them, Winter Bridgman, exemplifies the type of international professional officer who features widely in what follows, it is to him that I have chosen to dedicate this book. I am deeply grateful to Francis for all the work he has done. My thanks finally to friends at Kilmington, particularly Honor Medlam, Michael and Nesta Gray, Don and Marjorie Davis, and my love as always to my children and children-in-law, Lucy and Brooks Newmark, Thomas, Rose, Matthew and Mary and to my darling wife, Susanne.
Kilmington Manor
June 9, 1993
Introduction
I was not fated to be a warrior. A childhood illness left me lame for life in 1948 and I have limped now for forty-five years. When, in 1952, I reported for my medical examination for compulsory military service, the doctor who examined legs — he was, inevitably, the last doctor to examine me that morning — shook his head, wrote something on my form and told me that I was free to go. Some weeks later an official letter arrived to inform me that I had been classified permanently unfit for duty in any of the armed forces.
Fate nevertheless cast my life among warriors. My father had been a soldier in the First World War. I grew up in the Second, in a part of England where the British and American armies gathering for the D-Day invasion of Europe were stationed. In some way I detected that my father’s service on the Western Front in 1917–18 had been the most important experience of his life. The spectacle of the preparation for invasion in 1943–4 marked me also. It aroused an interest in military affairs that took root, so that when I went up to Oxford in 1953 I chose military history as my special subject.
A special subject was a requirement for a degree, no more than that, so that my involvement in military history might have ended at graduation. The interest, however, had bitten deeper during my undergraduate years, because most of the friends I made at Oxford had, unlike me, done their military service. They made me conscious of having missed something. Most had been officers and many had served on campaign, for Britain in the early 1950s was disengaging from empire in a series of small colonial wars. Some of my friends had soldiered in the jungles of Malaya or the forests of Kenya. A few, who had served in regiments sent to Korea, had even fought in a real battle.
Sober professional lives awaited them and they sought academic success and the good opinion of tutors as a passport to the future. Yet it was clear to me that the two years they had spent in uniform had cast over them the spell of an entirely different world from that they were set on entering. The spell was in part one of experience — of strange places, of unfamiliar responsibility, of excitement and even of danger. It was also the spell of acquaintance with the professional officers who had commanded them. Our tutors were admired for their scholarship and eccentricities. My contemporaries continued to admire the officers they had known for other qualities altogether — their dash, élan, vitality and impatience with the everyd
ay. Their names were often mentioned, their characters and mannerisms recalled, their exploits — above all their self-confident brushes with authority — recreated. Somehow I came to feel that I knew these light-hearted warriors and I certainly wanted to know people like them very badly, if only to flesh out my vision of the warrior’s world that, as I laboured over my military historical texts, was slowly taking shape in my mind.
When university life came to its end, and my friends departed to become lawyers, diplomats, civil servants or university tutors themselves, I found that the afterglow of their military years had cast its spell on me. I decided to become a military historian, a foolhardy decision since there were few academic posts in the subject. More quickly than I had any right to expect, however, such a post became vacant at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Britain’s cadet college, and in 1960 I joined the staff. I was twenty-five, I knew nothing about the army, I had never heard a shot fired in anger, I had scarcely met a regular officer and the picture I had of soldiers and soldiering belonged entirely to my imagination.
The first term I spent at Sandhurst pitched me headlong into a world for which not even my imagination had prepared me. In 1960 the military staff of the Academy — I belonged to its academic side — was composed, at the senior level, exclusively of men who had fought in the Second World War. The junior officers were almost all veterans of Korea, Malaya, Kenya, Palestine, Cyprus or any one of another dozen colonial campaigns. Their uniforms were covered with medal ribbons, often of high awards for gallantry. My head of department, a retired officer, wore on mess evenings the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross with two bars and his distinctions were not exceptional. There were majors and colonels with medals for bravery won at Alamein, Cassino, Arnhem and Kohima. The history of the Second World War was written in these little strips of silk that they wore so lightly and its high moments were recorded with crosses and medals which the bearers scarcely seemed conscious of having been awarded.