Reader's Guide to Military History

Charles Messenger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135959777
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book contains some 600 entries on a range of topics from ancient Chinese warfare to late 20th-century intervention operations. Designed for a wide variety of users, it encompasses general reviews of aspects of military organization and science, as well as specific wars and conflicts. The book examines naval and air warfare, as well as significant individuals, including commanders, theorists, and war leaders. Each entry includes a listing of additional publications on the topic, accompanied by an article discussing these publications with reference to their particular emphases, strengths, and limitations.

A

Abyssinia: British and Italian expeditions, 1867–1896

Bates, Darrell, The Abyssinian Difficulty: The Emperor Theodorus and the Magdala Campaign, 1867–1868, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979

Berkeley, G.F.H., The Campaign of Adowa and the Rise of Menelik, London: Constable, 1935; New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969 (original edition 1902)

Chandler, David G., “The Expedition to Abyssinia, 1867–8” in Victorian Military Campaigns, edited by Brian Bond, London: Hutchinson, and New York: Praeger, 1967; reprint, London: Donovan, 1994

Del Boca, Angelo, Gli Italiani in Africa Orientale [The Italians in East Africa], vol. 1, Dall’Unità alla Marcia su Roma [From Unification to the March on Rome], parts 1–2, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1984 [1976]

Dunn, John, “‘For God, Emperor, Country!’ The Evolution of Ethiopia’s Nineteenth-Century Army”, War in History, 1/3 (1994): 278–99

Gabre-Sellassie, Zewde, Yohannes IV of Ethiopia: A Political Biography, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975

Gooch, John, Army, State and Society in Italy, 1870–1915, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988

Marcus, Harold G., The Life and Times of Menelik II: Ethiopia, 1844–1914, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975

Myatt, Frederick, The March to Magdala: The Abyssinian War of 1868, London: Leo Cooper, 1970

Perry, James M., Arrogant Armies: Great Military Disasters and the Generals Behind Them, New York: Wiley, 1996

Rubenson, Sven, King of Kings: Tewodros of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa and London: Oxford University Press, 1966

Rubenson, Sven, The Survival of Ethiopian Independence, London: Heinemann, 1976

Vandervort, Bruce, Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa, 1830–1914, London: UCL Press, and Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998

Although the First Italian War in Ethiopia in the 1890s bulks far larger in world history than the brief British intervention in Ethiopia in 1867–68, it is the latter campaign that has attracted the most attention from military historians writing in English.

CHANDLER, well-known historian of the campaigns of Bonaparte and Marlborough, ascribes British victory in the 1867–68 campaign to the success of Sir Robert Napier’s Anglo-Indian army in overcoming the logistical challenges faced in bringing the Ethiopian army to bay before the country’s capital, Magdala, some 400 miles from the coast, and the superiority of British weaponry, particularly the new Snider breechloading rifle. Although the professed aim of the British intervention was to rescue the British consul and other Europeans taken hostage by Ethiopian King Tewodros II, dismissed by the invaders as “Mad King Theodore”, the monographs of BATES and MYATT make clear that there were other perhaps even more important objectives at stake. One was what a later trans-Atlantic generation might have called “kicking the Crimean War syndrome”. Napier’s lopsided victory helped restore public faith in Britain’s army after the much-publicized disasters of the war in the Crimea. Even more important, however, was the British desire to keep the Red Sea coast in friendly hands, particularly in view of the impending opening of the Suez Canal, which offered a shorter but much less secure lifeline to India.

What none of these standard accounts underline sufficiently is the importance of developments in Ethiopian domestic politics to the British victory. As RUBENSON (1966) informs us, Napier’s invasion coincided with a steep decline in King Tewodros’s support among the territorial lords of feudal Ethiopia. As GABRE-SELLASSIE suggests, the defection of powerful magnates such as the future king, Yohannes IV, enabled the British army to traverse the country with a minimal fear of attack and effectively denied Tewodros the means to defend his capital. Departing British troops rewarded Yohannes by leaving £500,000 worth of war matériel at his disposal.

Italy, Britain’s new protégé in the Horn of Africa, had no such luck. On 1 March 1896, an invading Italian expeditionary force suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Ethiopians at Adowa, a defeat that echoed around the world, demonstrating to colonized peoples everywhere that the European imperial powers were not invincible after all.

Although there is no account in English that comes close to capturing the full drama of Italy’s venture in East Africa in the way DEL BOCA has done in Italian, BERKELEY’S older work, though inevitably dated in some respects, remains useful, as it has the great virtue of placing the Italian intervention in the context of East African, and especially Ethiopian, politics. Berkeley is, however, vigorously pro-Italian and his account of the campaign needs to be set alongside the more critical treatments by GOOCH and VANDERVORT. His narrative is also largely bereft of notes and its bibliography consists of a few contemporary Italian titles.

Historians continue to debate the causes of Italy’s catastrophic defeat at Adowa. PERRY places the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Italian commander, General Oreste Baratieri, whom he finds at once over-confident and pusillanimous. GOOCH puts much store in the important fact that Italy was the only European power that tried to fight colonial wars with conscripts; unlike its British and French counterparts, the Italian army’s officers and men lacked any real training in or experience of colonial warfare. DEL BOCA and other recent Italian historians have blamed the loss on the contemptuous disregard of the Italian army for its Ethiopian foes, a disregard rooted in a sense of racial and technological superiority; thus, Baratieri’s army neglected to carry out adequate reconnaissance of the opposing force, whose huge numerical advantage and considerable firepower therefore remained hidden from them until the day of battle. VANDERVORT finds these reasons persuasive, along with poor map reading, which caused Italian units to become separated and enabled the Ethiopians to defeat them in detail, but, like DUNN, also believes it is crucial to bear in mind that the Ethiopian army Baratieri and Co. fought at Adowa was easily the best armed and most sophisticated indigenous military force faced by any European power during the wars of conquest in Africa. As Dunn reports, by the 1890s, with French assistance, the Ethiopian army had equipped most of its troops with magazine rifles; the army the Italians fought at Adowa also fielded machine guns and quick-firing artillery.

RUBENSON (1976) has situated Italy’s defeat at Adowa in the context of Ethiopia’s long struggle to preserve its independence against encircling foes. How, he asks, did Ethiopia manage to remain independent when most of the rest of Africa fell prey to European invaders? Not because of its forbidding terrain (Arnold Toynbee’s explanation). Rather, it was, in Rubenson’s view, because of the Ethiopian people’s stubborn attachment to their ancient Orthodox Christian faith and distinctive Ethiopian culture. Also, as MARCUS observes, the Ethiopian monarchy was on the way to achieving centralized control of the country for the first time when the Italians invaded in the 1890s.

For victorious Ethiopians, 1 March henceforth would be celebrated as “Adowa Day”, the country’s national holiday. For the defeated Italians, on the other hand, 1 March 1896 became a day of shame, whose memory would presumably be “wiped out” by the fascist invasion and conquest of Ethiopia in 1935.

BRUCE VANDERVORT

Afghanistan: First and Second Afghan Wars, 1839–1881

Cardew, EG., The Second Afghan War, 1878–80, London: John Murray, 1908 (abridged official account)

Dupree, Louis, “The Retreat of the British Army from Kabul to Jalalabad in 1842: History and Folklore”, Journal of the Folklore Institute, vol. 6 (1967): 25–45

Edwardes, Michael, Playing the Great Game: A Victorian Cold War – British and Russian Involvement in Afghanistan, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975

Hanna, Henry Bathurst, The Second Afghan War, 1878–79–80: Its Causes, Its Conduct and Its Consequences, 3 vols, London: Constable, 1899–1910

Heathcote, T.A., The Afghan Wars, 1839–1919, London: Osprey, 1980

Hopkirk, Peter, The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Kaye, John William, History of the War in Afghanistan, 2 vols, London: Richard Bentley, 1851

Macrory, Patrick, Kabul Catastrophe: The Story of the Disastrous Retreat from Kabul 1842: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986

Norris, James A., The First Afghan War, 1838–42, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967

Roberts, Frederick, Forty-One Years in India: From Subaltern to Commander-in-Chief, London: Richard Bentley, 1897

Robson, Brian, The Road to Kabul: The Second Afghan War, 1878–1881, 6 vols, London: Arms and Armour Press, 1986

HEATHCOTE’s unique and able survey of all three Afghan Wars provides the most useful general introduction to the First and Second Afghan Wars. The British Army’s dramatic invasion and humiliating defeat of the First War (1839–41) is well documented and he examines the Second War (1879–1881) in the light of the growth of rivalry between two of the most powerful states in Europe in the 19th century – Russia, a great totalitarian land power, and Britain, the pre-eminent sea power. In this context he gives a gripping account of Britain’s attempt to secure both Afghanistan and the northwest frontier against perceived hostile Russian influence.

The First Afghan War has attracted the attention of a number of eminent political and military historians as well as popular writers, mainly because the campaign culminated in one of the greatest military disasters of Queen Victoria’s reign, namely the retreat from Kabul (January 1842). Of these, two publications by NORRIS and MACRORY remain pre-eminent. Norris has produced, perhaps, the superior work if only in terms of the sheer breadth of the primary source material he has deployed. By re-examining many original sources Norris has challenged the more partisan views of KAYE, the pre-eminent Victorian chronicler of the war. Norris’s magisterial study seeks to assess the political significance of the Afghan crisis by relating it to the general Eastern Question while simultaneously seeking to vindicate the actions of the two primary instigators of the war, Lord Auckland and Alexander Burnes. Norris certainly succeeds in disentangling British and Indian policies towards Afghanistan and convincingly demonstrates that Auckland’s policy was part of a general Whig plan for the containment of Russian expansion in Asia. Macrory provides a similarly lucid but more dramatic account of the war and successfully isolates the shifting policies and subtle motivations of the main British and Afghan participants. Both sources provide excellent accounts of the military operations of the war, relying heavily on the two key eyewitnesses’ accounts of the Kabul debacle – Lady Sale and Lieutenant Eyre. Kaye’s very dated 19th century account of the war remains nevertheless a valuable primary source archive, including in the appendices many examples of relevant contemporary documentary material such as letters and official correspondence.

As with many Victorian colonial campaigns the indigenous perspective of the First Afghan War has been somewhat neglected. However, the landmark article by the American historian and anthropologist, DUPREE, has provided an extremely rare compilation of local Afghan oral memories of the disastrous British retreat from Kabul, a route he himself travelled and researched first-hand in 1963.

The larger scale and more extensive operations of the Second Afghan War have also spawned a significant amount of contemporary and 20th century publications. Some of the most scholarly analyses of the Second Afghan War can be found in the book and articles published by ROBSON. Robson’s main published work is based on an exhaustive study of both official documents and unpublished private diaries and memoirs, including the only six-volume account of the war which has ever been fully published. His book throws new and somewhat controversial light on the policies of the Commander-in-Chief, General Frederick Roberts, as well as the key political and military events of the war, notably the British defeat at Maiwand and the mass executions at Kabul. To supplement this important work readers should also consult the two central, if more dated, early 20th century publications by CARDEW and HANNA, the former comprising the abridged official account of the war and the latter a meticulous chronicle of the motivation, conduct and results of the war which took over three decades to complete.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries numerous British officers published accounts of their experiences during the Second Afghan War. Of these the inevitably partisan account of ROBERTS himself remains crucial to any understanding of the debates over the direction of the war. Recent revisionist appraisals of some of the main British participants of the war, including the publication of the diary of Major-General Charles McGregor, have, however, raised fresh controversies over the otherwise illustrious career of Field Marshal Lord Roberts. Finally, for an overall strategical perspective on both the First and Second Afghan Wars which supplements more specialized scholarly works by Alder and Yapp, the two books by EDWARDES and HOPKIRK should be consulted. Both authors succinctly analyse the political and military implications of the often heroic if shadowy struggle sustained between Russia and Britain to secure territorial advantage in central Asia, and specifically around and within the “buffer state” of Afghanistan. This rivalry, conducted largely by young British and Russian officers and known as the “Great Game”, continued throughout the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, and played a central role in the origins of all the Afghan wars.

EDMUND YORKE

See also Colonial Warfare; India: armed forces, 1600–1914; Roberts

Afghanistan: Third Afghan War

see India: Third Afghan War and Frontier campaigns, 1919–1945

Afghanistan: Soviet occupation, 1979–1988

Bonner, Arthur, Among the Afghans, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1987

Cordovez, Diego and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995

Grau, Lester W. (editor), The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan, Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 1996; London: Cass, 1998

Khan, Riaz M., Untying the Afghan Knot: Negotiating the Soviet Withdrawal, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1991

McMichael, Scott R., The Stumbling Bear: Soviet Military Performance in Afghanistan, London and Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1991

Newell, Nancy Peabody and Richard S. Newell, The Struggle for Afghanistan, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981

O’Ballance, Edgar, Afghan Wars: What Britain Gave up and the Soviet Union Lost, London and Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1993

Urban, Mark, War in Afghanistan, London: Macmillan, and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987; 2nd edition, 1990

The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979–88) was the first war fought by the Soviet army outside of its borders since 1945. It was, however, the fourth time that the Soviet army had been sent to “restore” a fledgling socialist government to power, in this instance the government of HafizuUah Amin. As a result of this invasion, Western military analysts had for the first time the opportunity to evaluate the Soviet army’s overall combat performance in a real war instead of the large training exercises. In turn, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to the publication of numerous books on its strategic, operational, and tactical abilities, as well as a series of books that have evaluated its diplomatic manoeuvring to extricate itself from a war that literally led to the unravelling of the USSR in 1991. Both the diplomatic and military accounts are written for the most part by acknowledged experts on the Soviet army and Afghanistan and are likely to remain the sources on this conflict for some time to come.

Included among the books in the political and diplomatic categories are NEWELL & NEWELL, KHAN, and CORDOVEZ & HARRISON. Each book is written by e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editor’s Note
• Board of Advisers
• Contributors
• Alphabetical List of Entries
• Thematic List
• Chronological List of Individuals
• Reader’s Guide to Military History
• Booklist Index
• General Index
• Notes on Advisers and Contributors