Customer Reviews

Battle: A History Of Combat and Culture

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A work of impressive scholarship by noted expert on seventeenth and eighteenth-century warfare John A. Lynn (Professor of History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Battle: A History Of Combat And Culture From Ancient Greece To Modern America definitively studies the history of war worldwide, including how ideas can carry more weight on the battlefield than heavy artillery. Exploring the influence that a culture's values has on armed conflict and vice versa, Battle: A History Of Combat And Culture is both a trek through time and a window of insight into the complex tangles of human society as exemplified by combat and conquest. Battle is a welcome addition to Military History Studies reference collections, as well as non-specialist general readers with an interest in the history of warfare and its influences upon the societies that engaged it as a tool of international relations -- willingly or unwillingly.

Lynn completely disproves Hanson's thesis about the Western way of warfare in the opening chapters of Battle. Lynn cites the examples of the ancient Chinese and Indian armies as having the same organization of the ancient Greek armies although they were not based on democratic ideals. The Chinese armies were organized around harsh dicipline and personal example by its leaders while the Indian armies were formed around caste allegiances.Moreover the Greek method of warfare was abondoned in Roman times through the emergence of the professsional army. Lynn also believes that there was no set example of "Oriental," fighting because the Chinese relied upon mass armies while the Indians based their warmaking on subversion and assasination. The middle chapters, Lynn contradicts Hanson in that European armies during the medeval and elightenment periods avoided battle and relied upon seiges. Lynn also describes the development of the Sepoys and how they became an effective fighting force by mixing the European invention of the regiment with local and religious allegiances. In the section about Clausewitz, Lynn states Clausewtiz's ideas about decisive battle and the national will have no use in the age of limited warfare. Lynn also disagrees with John Dower theory about race in the Pacific War by writing that different cultural assumptions about surrender led to the totality of the conflict. In his section about the Egyptian army, Lynn states how the Egyptian army by detailing every last movement by their army during the canal crossing in 1973 compensated for the poor quaility of the junior Egyptian officers. I would reccomend this book for anyone interested in new theories about culture and war that disprove the writings of Hanson and Keegan.