On Military History

Sadly, much of European history is about wars. Yet in textbooks and general histories, many of the wars are off-stage. Taking most of the bows are diplomatic negotiations, advantageous marriages, and court intrigues. How and why one side wins militarily is something of a mystery, at least to me.

This isn’t always the case, of course. Mark Kishlansky describes the British civil war campaigns in the 1640s—but not the Duke of Buckingham ‘s European military failures. “The English campaigns at Cadiz, the plan to relieve La Rochelle and the landing at Isle de Rhé were progressively catastrophic.”[1] But why?

For me, the biggest puzzle is the transformation of the French army during and after the French Revolution of 1789. Austria and Prussia attacked in 1792, routing ill-prepared French armies. But suddenly, “Military reversals and Austro-Prussian threats caused a wave of patriotic fervor to sweep France … Volunteer armies from the provinces streamed through Paris….[2] By 1794, the French were winning. How did that happen?

Military historians know the answers. However, according to the American Historical Association, in 2015 only 2.6 percent of all historians were military historians, slightly more than the field’s share 40 years ago.

Observers have suggested that military history is in decline. In a perceptive article on the Martin Center site in 2009, David Koons reported this angst. The latest figures had shown that only 1.9 percent of all faculty were military historians. Experts differed on whether this reflected an aversion to militarism, or just a natural shift in historiographical tastes. In any case, Koons wrote:

The field of drums and bugles is “finished,” [some historians] argue—there is nothing more to be gained from studying Jackson’s flanking maneuver at Chancellorsville or Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg. [3]

Nowhere is that shift clearer than in the story of Stephen Ambrose, well-known historian and author of such books as Band of Brothers, Citizen Soldiers, and D-Day (all about World War II), as well as Crazy Horse and Custer and Undaunted Courage (both about the American West).  In 1996 Ambrose wanted to honor his former professor at the University of Wisconsin, William Hesseltine, with a chair in military history. As Martin Wooster wrote in 2011:

When he died in 2002, Ambrose had raised $1 million, short of the $1.5 million the university said it needed to create the chair. The money sat idle until 2006, when the university suddenly announced it was launching a search for a professor for the chair after a national magazine exposed what the university was doing.  Not until 2009—13 years after Ambrose began fundraising—was the chair filled. [4]

We now know more about the holder of that chair, John Hall. In a sense, he was a brilliant choice. Hall attended West Point and has an impressive teaching record. But his sole book in 2009 was about the Black Hawk War, a four-month war in 1832 between a group of Native Americans and U.S. government forces (much of it in Wisconsin), and he is now researching “the military history of Indian Removal in the southeastern United States.” When his appointment was announced, a Wisconsin history professor said in a news release, “He is re-thinking basic concepts like the American way of war, total war and counterinsurgency.”

That is probably not what Stephen Ambrose had in mind, or even the supporters of the chair, but it may offer a good picture of the military history discipline today.

[1] Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain, 1603-1714 (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 115.

[2] John P. McKay, Bennett D. Hill, and John Buckler, A History of Western Society, 4^th edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 676.

[3] David Koons, “Retreat, But No Surrender for Military History,” James G; Martin Center for Academic Renewal, September 24, 2009.

[4] Martin Wooster, “How Colleges Rip Off Donors,” James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, December 4, 2011.