Why Study Military History?

Military history is a sub-discipline within the larger field of historical studies that focuses on the documentation and explanation of armed conflicts. Military historians may study tactics and strategies used in past wars, or the leadership, technology, and politics surrounding them. They strive to understand how wars begin, how they are fought and why, as well as how they end and the consequences they have in the long-term. Since wars have been waged since the dawn of recorded history, military historians have existed for just as long. Throughout university history departments, which have been increasingly dominated by identity studies, military history is often viewed as an antiquated field. It is frequently neglected by those who believe war is not important for analysing the larger causes and effects of history. Others may argue that war is too morbid and unpleasant a subject to read about or that learning about wars is not relevant to today’s world. There are also relatively few professors that specialize in the study of war and universities tend to be reserved about offering courses solely on the topic. Nowadays, identity studies and social history are the main fields of interest among historians and classical topics like war have been placed on the backburner. I believe that this neglect of military history is a misguided attitude, since the lessons of war are now more relevant than ever. Those who have the most to benefit from studying military history are soldiers, especially officers, in whose hands rests the responsibility for many lives besides their own. It is the duty of the officer more than anyone to learn from the mistakes of the past and strive not to repeat them in the future. However, they are not the only ones to benefit from studying military history. Due to the nature of wars today, it is as much the duty of the ordinary person, as well as the soldier to pay heed to the lessons of battlefields past. We must not make the error of neglecting them.

One of my favourite quotes is by George Santayana who said that “Those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.” Military history, of course is no exception. If high-ranking officers are ignorant about how past wars were fought and won, how can they be expected to command their troops to wage them effectively? Many of the most grievous disasters in war have occurred when officers issued commands out of ignorance of past mistakes. Adolf Hitler for example, would likely have conducted his invasion of the Soviet Union much differently, if not at all, had he possessed a greater knowledge of Napoleon’s campaigns in Russia. Many of the errors committed during the Battle of Stalingrad are eerily similar those made by Napoleon at Borodino. Both Hitler and Napoleon had ordered their men to march across the vast territory of Russia, thereby stretching out their supply lines. Even with the advent of motor vehicles, the Wehrmacht were mostly supplied by the same means as Napoleon’s armies—by horse-drawn carts. Once Hitler’s forces reached Stalingrad, they were already unprepared to hold the city in the long-run due to its poor logistics. Both Napoleon and The Wehrmacht underestimated the Russian will to resist and ignored several other decisive factors such as disease, local resistance, and Russian weather. Hitler’s obsession with Stalingrad and his irrational commitment to its capture was the same fatal flaw that underlined Napoleon’s attack on Moscow. The Germans should have also taken greater efforts in resupplying their troops and preparing them for harsh winter conditions, both things that Napoleon similarly neglected. Hitler’s invasion of Russia was poorly conceived and it reveals his fundamental lack of understanding of past military mistakes. Nearly a million Germans were killed at Stalingrad for following the orders issued by this madman. When the reins of power are thrust into the hands of someone like Hitler who was largely ignorant about matters of strategy and command, the horrors of the past are bound to repeat themselves. Although it is fortunate for most of the western world that he did not succeed in his goals, Hitler’s failure stands as a grim testament to the consequences of ignoring the past.   

It should be obvious that studying military history is useful for soldiers, but what about the average person? Even though the majority of human beings do not command armies or fight in battles, the lessons of war are still relevant to everyone and should be given a higher regard in the discipline of history. Even those who find the topic of war distasteful and would rather not have anything to do with it are not removed from the system that wages them. Wars often require the public support of a civilian population to be successful. When the public grants its approval for its nation to wage war beyond its capacity to win, casualties and hardships will ensue. The First World War began with enormous public support. European governments of the early twentieth century, especially Germany, fostered a militaristic zeal among the population and thus one of the costliest wars in human history began without any meaningful resistance. People paraded in the streets to celebrate the onset of the bloodiest war ever fought. It is easy in hindsight for us to condemn those over-enthusiastic supporters for their naivety. We feel they should have known about technological improvements in weaponry throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that made the prospect of war deadlier than ever. Machine-guns, airplanes, barbed-wire, and high-explosive ordinance turned Europe into a bloodbath between the years of 1914 to 1918. The immense size of European standing armies at the dawn of World War One only meant that a quick decisive war (as the public wished it to be) was impossible. The use of human-wave tactics against heavily fortified positions was trademark of trench warfare and was responsible so many dead. These tactics were adapted from those used in European warfare since the invention of gunpowder. When these out-dated tactics clashed against modern weaponry, it led such battles as The Somme, Ypres, and Verdun. It is debatable whether the First World War would have been as catastrophic, or if it would have occurred at all, had more people resisted their governments’ call to arms from the onset on the basis that such a war was counterproductive and ill-conceived. But hindsight is always 20/20. If we wish to mitigate the misery and destruction that wars bring, our duty is to educate ourselves about wars in the past: why they begin, how they are waged, and how they end. A public that finds itself ignorant of past conflicts is unprepared to face those of the future.

Pre-war celebrations in Britain

The study of warfare also has great value from a psychological or anthropological perspective, since many themes, feelings, and rhetoric in wars remain constant over time and therefore reveal unalienable lessons about human behaviour. Parallels can even be drawn between conflicts today and those of classical antiquity. The Tet Offensive of 1968 of the Vietnam War was an incident from which many important lessons can be gleaned. In early 1968, the American public was assured that the ongoing war in Vietnam was nearing a close and that they would soon emerge as victor against the wretched North Vietnamese. Tet would change all that. During the Tet New Year’s celebrations on 20 January, 1968, when a three day truce was traditionally observed, North Vietnamese commandos stormed major cities in South Vietnam, including Hue, Khesanh, and Saigon and slaughtered thousands.  Although the Americans quickly retaliated and recaptured all the cities lost during Tet with minimal casualties suffered, the damage had been done. The American public’s perception of the war back home had deteriorated. Even though Tet was a decisive American military victory, it showed them that the Communists were willing to sacrifice themselves on masse to get rid of the Americans. It demonstrated the tremendous will of the North Vietnamese to resist American occupation, whatever the cost. In short, it revealed to the Americans back home that Vietnam was not going to be the quick and easy victory they had hoped for, which ultimately influenced the decision to withdraw from Vietnam over the next five years.

But the Tet Offensive was only a microcosm of a larger trend in warfare, namely that a prolonged and unnecessary war in enemy territory is never beneficial, and that a people occupied by a foreign army will tend resist at all costs. Tet is certainly not the first instance of this. When he Athenian armies invaded Sicily in 415 BCE, they were in comparable situation to the Americans at Vietnam. Like the US, Athens possessed one of the fiercest armies in the western world. According to Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War, The Athenian expedition force to Sicily consisted of 5100 hoplites, 750 Mantineans, 1300 irregulars, and nearly 200 triremes, greatly outnumbering the Sicilians. The Athenians saw a few early victories, but once the Sicilians made a concerted effort to resist the invasion with the help of Sparta, attitudes about the war back in Athens began to sway. Just like after the Tet Offensive, anti-war sentiments on the home front undermined the campaign abroad. The Athenians began to question why they were even fighting in Sicily to begin with. The Athenian general Nicias expressed these sentiments when he argued to the Ecclesia that a war against the population in Sicily could not be won, given their enemies were too numerous and arduous to conquer. This lack of support for the invasion itself led to a lack of support for the troops they had already committed to the field. As a result, the entire expedition force was obliterated; everyone was either slaughtered or sold into slavery.

We should not be too quick to condemn the Americans for waging an unwinnable and counterproductive war in Vietnam. It is easy to compare the disastrous invasion of Sicily to the Vietnam War only through the clarity of hindsight. The truth is, history rarely offers cookie-cutter examples of past events to live by. That is why studying history is necessary—so that we may learn from the past and adapt these lessons to the unique circumstances and nuances of the present. The Vietnam War and the Invasion of Sicily were completely different events but the parallels between the two are obvious. They reveal that the outcomes of wars are often determined as much by people at home as they are by the troops in the field. Oftentimes, the public will clamour for war, but once war becomes a reality and victory is not as swift as people had imagined, they withdraw support and then seek to cut their losses. There have been countless examples throughout history of nations swept up in the fervour and rhetoric of warmongering without any real understanding of how the war is to be fought or why. Only by a firm grasp on the consequences of past wars can we hope to mitigate the bloodshed of future ones. It is only by the study of military history that one can know the true costs and rewards of waging war. Therefore, a public that is ignorant about military tactics and strategy is likely to support a war that is against its own interests or in which they become its many victims. All the examples I have cited, from the Invasion of Sicily in 451 BCE, to the First World War, The Battle of Stalingrad, and Tet are all disasters which reveal the cost of ignoring history.

I can imagine some people may disagree with me on the basis that wars are a thing of the past and that it would be best not to learn about ancient battles because they have no relevance to today’s world. The death of war has been proclaimed many times before. On the eve of World War One, many people thought that a large scale conflict was impossible due to the complex system of alliances that existed at the time. For the ninety-nine years between the Battle of Waterloo and the invasion of Belgium in 1914, there was a shaky peace throughout Europe. But as we have seen, peace was not to last. With tensions between Ukraine and Russia still unresolved as of June 2014, we still face the possibility of war in Europe today. The lessons of Sicily and Vietnam are more relevant than ever, with American involvement in Iraq ending as recently as 2011, a conflict that in many ways echoed these two. We still get threats of annihilation from North Korea every few months. Last year, as Americans urged their President to intervene militarily in Syria, we can see that for many people history continues to repeat itself. I do not believe that another large-scale armed conflict like the World Wars will necessarily occur any time soon, but it remains a distinct possibility. As long as there are human beings whose interests oppose each other, war will continue to rear its head from time to time.

It is foolish to disregard the importance of military history. Identity studies, social, and political history all have their place in the field, but war has been one of the dominant forces of change in our civilization. As such, military history deserves no less consideration than the study of gender, politics, race, class, or religion.