A History of Warfare

by John Keegan

  In the century that began with the French Revolution, military logic and cultural ethos took divergent and contradictory courses. In the developing industrial world, conditions of growing wealth and the rise of liberal values encouraged the expectation that the historic hardship under which mankind had laboured was on the wane. That optimism proved insufficient, however, to alter the means by which states settled disputes between themselves. Much of the riches that industrialism generated went, indeed, to militarise the populations that it benefited, so that when war came in the twentieth century its ‘recalcitrant indecisiveness’, as Weigley observes, reasserted itself with even greater force. The reaction of the rich states was to embark on an ever more intense militarisation of their populations from above, in an attempt to break the deadlock. As the tide of war spilled over into the poor world, militarisation began from below, as the leaders of movements dedicated to winning freedom from European empires and an equivalent to Western economic well-being compelled peasants to become warriors. Both developments were fated to end in frustration. The appalling human cost of mass militarisation suffered by the industrialised states in the second of the two world wars led to the development of nuclear weapons, designed to end wars without the commitment of manpower to the battlefield, but proving once deployed to threaten the end of everything. Mass militarisation in the poor world resulted not in liberation but in the entrenchment of oppressive regimes raised to power at the cost of widespread suffering and death.

  It is in this state the world finds itself now. Despite confusion and uncertainty, it seems just possible to glimpse the emerging outline of a world without war. It would be a bold man who argued that war was going out of fashion. The resurgent nationalisms of the peoples of the Balkans and of former Soviet Transcaucasia, which have found expression in warmaking of a particularly abhorrent kind, give the lie to that. Such wars, however, lack the menace raised by similar conflicts in the pre-nuclear world. They provoke not the threat of sponsorship by opposed great-power patrons, with all the danger of ramification that such sponsorship implies, but a humanitarian urge to intervene in the cause of peace-making. Prospects of peace-making may be illusory. The Balkan and Transcaucasian conflicts are ancient in origin and seem to have as their object that ‘territorial displacement’ familiar to anthropologists from their study of ‘primitive’ war. Such conflicts by their nature defy efforts at mediation from outside, since they are fed by passions and rancours that do not yield to rational measures of persuasion or control; they are apolitical, to a degree for which Clausewitz made little allowance.

  Yet the fact that the effort is being made betokens a profound change in civilisation’s attitude to war. The effort at peace-making is motivated not by calculation of political interest but by repulsion from the spectacle of what war does. The impulse is humanitarian, and though humanitarians are old opponents of warmaking, humanitarianism has not before been declared a chief principle of a great power’s foreign policy, as it has now by the United States, nor has it found an effective supranational body to give it force, as it has recently in the United Nations, nor has it found tangible support from a wide body of disinterested states, willing to show their commitment to the principle by the despatch of peace-keeping, and potentially peace-making forces to the seat of conflict. President Bush may have overreached himself in proclaiming the appearance of a New World Order. The elements of a new world resolution to suppress the cruelties of disorder are, nevertheless, clearly visible. Such resolution, if it persists, is the most hopeful outcome of the events of our terrible century.

  The concept of cultural transformation has pitfalls for the unwary. Expectations that benevolent change — rising living standards, literacy, scientific medicine, the spread of social welfare — would alter human behaviour for the better, have so often been dashed that it may seem unrealistic to foresee the arrival of effective anti-warmaking attitudes in the world. Yet profound cultural changes do occur and their occurrence can be documented. As the American political scientist John Mueller has observed,

  the institution of human slavery was created at the dawn of the human race, and many once felt it to be an elementary fact of existence. Yet between 1788 and 1888 the institution was substantially abolished … and this demise seems, so far, to be permanent. Similarly the venerable institutions of human sacrifice, infanticide and duelling seem also to have died out or been eliminated. It could be argued that war, at least war in the developed world, is following a similar trajectory.63

  Mueller, it must be said, is a disbeliever in the proposition that man is biologically disposed towards violence, one of the most fiercely contested issues in behavioural science, from which most military historians prudently distance themselves. It is not necessary, however, to take the disbelieving view in order to be impressed by the evidence that mankind, wherever it has the option, is distancing itself from the institution of warfare.

  I am impressed by the evidence. War, it seems to me, after a lifetime of reading about the subject, mingling with men of war, visiting the sites of war and observing its effects, may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a desirable or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their discontents. This is not mere idealism. Mankind does have the capacity, over time, to correlate the costs and benefits of large and universal undertakings. Throughout much of the time for which we have a record of human behaviour, mankind can clearly be seen to have judged that war’s benefits outweighed its costs, or appeared to do so when a putative balance was struck. Now the computation works in the opposite direction. Costs clearly exceed benefits. Some of these costs are material. The superinflationary expense of weapon procurement distorts the budgets even of the richest states, while poor states deny themselves the chance of economic emancipation when they seek to make themselves militarily formidable. The human costs of actually going to war are even higher. Rich states, as between themselves, recognise that they are not to be borne. Poor states which fall into war with rich states are overwhelmed and humiliated. Poor states which fight each other, or are drawn into civil war, destroy their own well-being, and even the structures which make recovery from the experience of war possible. War truly has become a scourge, as was disease throughout most of human history. The scourge of disease has, almost within living memory, been very largely defeated and, though it is true that disease had no friends as war has had friends, war now demands a friendship which can only be paid in false coin. A world political economy which makes no room for war demands, it must be recognised, a new culture of human relations. As most cultures of which we have knowledge were transfused by the warrior spirit, such a cultural transformation demands a break with the past for which there are no precedents. There is no precedent, however, for the menace with which future war now confronts the world. Charting the course of human culture through its undoubtedly warlike past towards its potentially peaceful future is the theme of this book.

  Interlude 1

  Limitations on Warmaking

  To look forward to a future in which recourse to war has been brought under rational limitation should not lead us into the false view that there have been no limitations on warmaking in the past. The higher political and ethical systems attempted to impose legal or moral restrictions both on the use of war and its usages from early times. The most important limitations on warmaking, however, have always lain beyond the will or power of man to command. They belong within the realm of what the Soviet General Staff used to call ‘permanently operating factors’, and such factors — weather, climate, seasons, terrain, vegetation — always affect, often inhibit and sometimes altogether prohibit the operations of war. Other factors, loosely categorised as ‘contingent’ and including difficulties of supply, provisioning, quartering and equipment, have strictly limited the scope, intensity and duration of warmaking in many periods of human history. As wealth increased and technology developed, some were reduced or largely overcome — the soldier’s rations, for example, may n
ow be preserved in convenient form for almost indefinite periods — but none can be said to have been eliminated altogether. How to feed, how to shelter, how to move an army in the field remain today the first, chief and most persistent problems that a commander has to solve.

  Perhaps the effect of both ‘permanent’ and ‘contingent’ factors in limiting the scope and intensity of offensive or defensive operations is best illustrated from naval warfare. Man may fight with his fists on land, but to do even that on the surface of the water he requires a buoyant platform. Purpose-built platforms we must guess, since of their nature they decompose, appeared comparatively late in human history. The earliest to be found has been dated only to 6315 BC and given the effort, probably cooperative effort, needed to construct the simplest raft or dugout, we may presume that the bone and stone tools which provide evidence of man’s earliest industry predate boatbuilding by a very long period indeed.1

  Specialised warships, even ships suitable for war, are relatively recent in origin. They have always been expensive to build and they require handling by specialist crews. Their construction and operation therefore demands considerable disposable wealth, probably the surplus of a ruler’s revenue; and if the earliest form of fighting at sea was piratical rather than political in motive, we must remember that even the pirate needs capital to start in business. The first navies may or may not have been anti-piratical in purpose — the advantages conferred by the ability to move forces or supplies along rivers or coasts may have first prompted rulers to maintain warships — but navies are, by definition, more costly than individual ships. Whichever way it is looked at, fighting on water has cost more than fighting on land from the start.

  Wealth, or the lack of it, is not the only factor to limit the ability to wage war at will on water; others are weather and deficiencies of propulsive power. Wind comes free and the earliest representation we have of naval warfare — of a fight between warriors of the Pharaoh Rameses III and the Sea Peoples in the Nile delta in 1186 BC — shows the Egyptians in a ship with sails.2 Sailing-ships, however, were not to make suitable fighting platforms before the invention of the gun, since the management of sails precluded engagement at the short ranges where pre-gunpowder weapons could take effect. Oared ships were much more manoeuvrable in encounters where crews sought to close hand-to-hand with swords and spears. The advantages of the oared ship went further: by mounting a ram, and working up to full rowing speed, it could actually sink another if it caught it broadside on, which a wooden sailing-ship stout enough to bear the shock of impact could not do. Light winds would not impart the necessary speed; strong winds raise seas in which no captain with a thought for the survival of his ship would risk such an encounter.

  The oared ship had serious deficiencies as a ship of war, however; in confined waters, like those of the Mediterranean, dominated from the second millennium BC onward by a succession of rich states that could afford the manpower costs, it was to set the terms of naval warfare until the coming of the gun. Yet it could not keep the seas in bad weather and so was essentially a summertime weapon. Worse, it could not work away from a port of re-supply for more than a few days at a time, since the hull form which made it fast in smooth waters — long but shallow and narrow — deprived it of the carrying space required to feed and water the large crew needed to row it at ramming speed. True, it was later to be used outside the inland seas as a vehicle of marauding in oceanic waters by nihilists like the Vikings — once they had mastered the technology of deep-keel construction and the technique of star-sight navigation — where it spread terror, devastation and death over coasts and riverine lands hundreds of miles from base. The Vikings, however, flourished in an era when states were weak, particularly at sea, and in any case they depended on the wind to carry their longships to undefended shores, using oars only for auxiliary purposes.

  In consequence, as John Guilmartin has demonstrated in his brilliant analysis of Mediterranean naval warfare, galley navies were never autonomous instruments of strategy but extensions, or more accurately partners, of armies on land.3 The inshore wing of a galley fleet normally hinged on the coastward flank of an accompanying army, in operations that were amphibious in the strict sense of the term. The fleet manoeuvred so as to isolate an enemy coastal base from support by its own naval forces, while the army advanced with supplies to positions from which the galleys could be re-provisioned. This symbiosis explains why the great Mediterranean sea battles, from Salamis in 480 BC to Lepanto in AD 1571, were all fought within sight of land. Why, though, once the big-gun sailing-ship came to exercise mastery of the seas — that is, from the sixteenth century onward — were most naval battles still fought within sight of land, or very close to it? Two of the victories won by the greatest of sailing-ship admirals, Nelson, were gained against fleets lying inshore at anchor — the Nile and Copenhagen — while the third, Trafalgar, was the result of an encounter only twenty-five miles off the Spanish coast. The tendency for sailing-fleets to fight inshore had nothing to do with endurance. The wooden man-of-war, unlike the galley, carried stores and water sufficient to keep it at sea for many months, so that as early as 1502 Portuguese ships, which had sailed round the Cape of Good Hope, were able to fight and defeat the fleet of a local ruler off the west coast of India. In the 1650s Cromwell’s admiral, Blake, could campaign in the Mediterranean, where England then had no base, while by the middle of the next century Britain and France were conducting intensive naval campaigns against each other off the east coast of India, six months’ sailing-time from home. Despite their distance from base, all these fleets continued to do battle in coastal waters.

  Several reasons combine to explain this circumstance. One is that battle under sail could not be conducted in rough weather (an exception was Quiberon Bay, fought in Atlantic squalls in November 1759) and inshore waters are more often calm than the high seas. Another is that the objects for which naval battles are fought — free access to the high seas from port, protection of coastwise shipping, defence against invasion — have their locus in coastal waters. A third is that sailing-fleets, operating exclusively by visual communication, have extreme difficulty finding each other in great waters. Even with a chain of frigates, the visual link between each was at most twenty miles; many fleets missed each other with the greatest ease, as Nelson found at the Nile in 1798. It is significant that in two real but rare deep-sea encounters — the second battle of Finisterre, 1747, fought 200 miles off Ushant, and the Glorious First of June, 1794, fought again off Ushant but 400 miles into the Atlantic, both between the British and French — the French fleets were in both cases encumbered by convoys, the latter 130 ships strong, covering so large an area of sea that they made a much more prominent target for a pursuer than their escort of warships would have done if sailing alone.

  The supersession of sail by steam as a means of propulsion might be thought to have loosened the link between the warship and the land, since a steam warship could manoeuvre to engage even in flat calm, and remained a stable gun-platform at wind speeds that forced sailing-warships to reef and close their gunports. Paradoxically, however, the steam ship actually restored the logistic dependency under which the galley had lain and greatly diminished the operating range of steam fleets relative to that of sailing-fleets. The reason was that until the comparatively late adoption of oil fuel, steam warships burnt coal at an enormous rate — HMS Dreadnought of 1906 emptied its bunkers in five days’ steaming at twenty knots — and so were tied to their coaling-stations.4 A naval power like Great Britain, which acquired its worldwide network of bases in sailing-ship days, could keep fleets in all the oceans because they could coal at hundreds of ports; even so, they were local, not oceanic, in range. A state without such a chain of bases could either not project naval power at all, or was dependent on the goodwill of allies to do so. When Russia sent its Baltic fleet to the Far East in 1904–5, at a time when it was on bad terms with Britain, the ships managed the voyage only by piling their decks so high with coa
l that, between stops at French colonial ports, they could not have used their guns.

  It is an extra paradox that coal-fired fleets, though in theory capable of oceanic encounter (two days’ steaming would carry them 500 miles from land), continued in practice to clash near coasts. In part the same strategic factors affected them, but they also continued, like their sailing predecessors, to be virtually blind until the coming of wireless; indeed, the real extension of their line of sight had to wait upon the arrival of the wireless-equipped, shipborne aircraft. As a result, all the sea battles of the First World War were fought within a hundred miles of land; the pattern repeated itself in the Second World War, despite the advent of radar, the aircraft-carrier and the long-range patrol submarine, and the mastery of the technique of replenishment at sea. The ultimate explanation derives from the vastness of the oceans; fleets could rarely count upon defeating distance in the vasty deep. The American aircraft that sank the Japanese carriers at Midway — one of the few true oceanic encounters in the history of the world — were guided to them by shrewd guesswork; the Bismarck, eventually sunk a thousand miles off Brest in May 1941, had twice shaken off the whole of Britain’s Home Fleet; while the mid-Atlantic battles between Allied escorts and surfaced German U-boats were brought about because large, slow convoys made abnormally conspicuous targets. Given the resistance offered to surveillance systems by the movements of oceanic storms, such as the large weather fronts which the Japanese used to cover their approach to Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and the persisting difficulty of coordinating long- with short-range target-acquisition equipment, the seas may well keep their secrecy for a long time to come.