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50 Battles That Changed the World

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There's a lot to like about William Weir's 50 Battles That Changed The World. But there are also some problems. I would recommend this book, but only as a companion to other similar works, such as Battles That Changed History by Geoffrey Reagan.

The author has an interesting take on the importance of these 50 battles, preferring to focus on how the battles shaped modern civilization. That is certainly a valid approach. Many to most of his choices are impeccable, but several choice are questionable.

He includes some rather curious choices such as Dublin, the Nika Rebellion, Petrograd, Tanga and Wu-sung. But not Yorktown, Gettysburg, Crecy, El Alamein, Salamis, Blenheim or Dien Bien Phu.

There's 11 pages on Tenochititlan, and nine pages on the battle of Chickamauga, for instance, compared to five on Saratoga and Waterloo.

And listing the Nika Rebellion as the second most important battle of all time? Hard to figure where that is coming from.

There's little to nothing about military strategic and tactics, which is why I think most people read this sort of thing.

There are almost no maps, and the illustrations are small.

Also, there are numerous typos, many of them just careless, such as the caption that says (insert commander here).

Again, it's an interesting take on the world's great battles. Just don't take it as gospel.

I've read at least a dozen of these "turning points" books, and this is by far the best so far produced in the realm of military history, far superior to even more recent work. William Weir's prose is infinitely more readable than the academic language that typically obscures more than it reveals. He makes his points and makes them clear rather than burying them in infinite analyses that leave you wondering what the original point was.

He is also not afraid to take a stand and point the finger where it belongs most of the time. His work does not make repeated apologies to the darlings of political correctness, and is not afraid to say, for example, that the Islamic world brought its own failures on itself by the smug, dismissive way it acted after Hattin, or that the lands of North Africa were Christian until the explosive Islamic conquest in the 600s. Likewise he is not afraid to shatter certain myths of military history that are just that, myths, such as the Teutoburg Forest, the Plains of Abraham, and the Siege of Orleans.

Although I find myself disagreeing with him on the importance of certain battles, which appear to be rehashes of the entries in his groudbreaking Fatal Victories, most of his calls regarding importance are right on the money, and should shake up the lists written by complacent academics.

Although not entirely bad and containing some interesting historical information, this book contains many questionable choices of battles and poor scholarship.

The best example is its section on the battle of Chickamauga, which is the only battle of the American Civil War included inside. Not only was the battle not very decisive (its greatest effect was to halt the Union advance into Georgia for a few months), but the author's justification of it is laughable. He brushes aside Gettysburg and Vicksburg by saying "[it] proved only what Lee had already demonstrated at Antietam: that he couldn't conquer the North" for the former and "But the Union already controlled 99% of the great river" for the latter. Both have many factual errors, such as the fact that Lee never intended to conquer the North with his invasion and that the nature of a river means that even one stronghold can block it off entirely.

The rest of the book has errors of a similar nature. Midway is listed, while Guadalcanal is not. Never mind that the former was purely defensive, while the latter was a draining engagement that wrecked the Japanese air force and showed the Americans that Japan could be beaten decisively on land.

Overall, a book with more bad points than good ones.

Any book that attempts to list the "50 greatest" battles in history is going to be vulnerable to many criticisms. However, W. Weir stays away from any false claims of achievement and simply provides engaging summaries of some of the most important military clashes of the last 3,000 years. Each description is 4 or 5 pages long, and broadly covers causes, people, tactics, and other general elements. This is not an academic book in the least; it's the kind of book you pick up every once in awhile, open to a random page and enjoy.

This is a well written book, and a highly entertaining read, but I take strong exception to some of the author's choices.

For example, how he can call the Battle of Tanga, in 1914, one of the most decisive battles in history (it was a WWI battle between British and German colonial troops in Africa that very few people have ever heard of, and which had NO appreciable effect on the outcome of the war), while leaving the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 off the list entirely simply defies reason. Manzikert was the defeat that sent the Byzantine Empire into an irreversible death spiral, that paved the way for Islamic Ottoman expansion into Europe (whose aftermath we are still living with today in the form of religious strife in the Balkans), and was partly responsible for prompting the great voyages of discovery made by western Europeans from the 15th century onward (The Ottomans were now firmly astride the old trade nexus of Constantinople, and Europeans were looking for new ways to access the wealth of the Orient). Manzikert was a tremendously decisive battle, of the sort that genuinely changed the course of world history. Tanga simply wasn't. This does not make sense.

Other choices are equally bizarre. I'm sorry, but there's no way the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, or the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, or the aforementioned Battle of Tanga were more historically decisive than Manzikert, and other battles which were also inexplicably left off the list altogether, such as Salamis, The Teutoburger Wald, or the unsuccessful Ottoman attempt to take Vienna in 1529.

The book is certainly interesting, and not all of the author's picks are bad ones by any means. But some of his choices simply have me scratching my head wondering "what on earth was he thinking here?"

As the title suggests, this book is a list of the 50 most important battles in history, organized in order of importance. The battles range from Marathon (490 BC) to the Tet Offensive (1968 AD). The individuals chapters each cover a battle, and range from some three pages to some eleven pages (this is rough figuring on the reviewers part). They are well laid out, reducing the text to small, easily understood topics, which combine to give the reader a good overall understanding of the battle and its ramifications. As an added bonus, a quick biographical glossary is included, as is a glossary of military terms.

As the author admits in the introduction, this ordering of the "importance" of battles is highly subjective, and no two authors would likely produce the exact same lists. That said, though, this book is a real treasure. The battles that it does cover, are handled in a clear and easily understood style, and are covered in a concise manner that makes this book easily read.

All of the pictures in this book are black-and-white, but they are plentiful, as are the maps that are always necessary in this sort of a book. So, if you are interested in a book that is a collection of battles from all over the world, then I highly recommend this book to you!

Like the other of William Weir's books that I have read, this one is well written and informative. It gives a history of what he feels are the 50 battles that changed the world. Each battle is covered in about 6 pages, so only a general overview is provided. All in all I liked this book, but with some reservations.
Pros:
1) More important than the battles is the preliminary discussion of the history leading up to the battle, a capsule history of the commanders and the importance of the battle.
2) Good if you just want a general review of the subject, written in an entertaining style.
3) While centered the western world, it also covers a few battles in the rest of the world (Mexico, China, Middle East).
4) Several interesting appendices are included. Weir provides a capsule history of all of the important leaders discussed in the book, a glossary of military terms and five different timelines (which compare the battles discussed in the book in terms of things like the development of democracy, East versus West and the development of European nationhood.)
5) This book is written for a general audience rather than experts in military history.
6) There is a lot of interesting information provided in this book and I gained new insights into many areas of history. For instance, I had always viewed the blue versus green conflicts in Constantinople as being akin to the rivalry between supporters of different sports teams in the same city. I learned from this book that the blues and greens were primarily Christian religious factions, who also supported different chariot teams.

While this book is very interesting it has several shortcomings that a potential reader should be aware of.
Cons:
1) This book does not give a detailed discussion the battles or of the tactics and strategy that were employed. If that is your primary interest then Fuller's "Military History of the Western World" or Liddell Hart's "Strategy" are better choices.
2) There is no overriding theme to the book, such as the development of tactics and weapons. (If this is your interest, then Weir has books on the 50 most important weapons and important turning points in military history that you will find of interest.)
3) While there are a few non-Western battles, but all are told from the perspective of their importance to Western Civilization. There are no battles that are important just to Asian Civilization, Indian Civilization, or Latin American Civilizations.
4) This book lists the 50 battles that Weir thinks are the most important and the battles are discussed in what he feels are their order of importance. Students of history will no doubt disagree with Weir's choice of battles and his listing of their importance. For instance, few students of the American Civil War would rate the battle at Chickamauga as being more important than Antietam or Gettysburg. I suspect that Chickamauga was included because he had already written the chapter for a previous book (see below).
5) Basing the book on the Weir's idea of the order of importance of the battles that are discussed makes the book very disjointed. For instance, the battle of the Atlantic during WWII is succeeded by Cannae in 216 BC, which is followed by Malplaquet in 1709, which is then followed by Carrhae in 53 BC. There is no chronological continuity and, in my opinion this makes it difficult to follow the historical development of nations, weapons, tactics or anything else. Weir does provide an appendix that lists the battles in chronological order, so the reader could read the chapters in that order instead of that given in the book, but it is cumbersome to do so.
6) This book will probably disappoint experts in military history as being too superficial, but then again it was not written for that audience.
7) There is a considerable overlap with a previous book of Weir's, "Fatal Victories". That book is focused on victories that ultimately lead to unwanted consequences. Ten of the 14 battles discussed in the previous book were also, verbatim in parts, chapters in this book. If you liked the previous book, you will like this one, but you get only 40 new battles, without the emphasis on the fatal aspects of the 10 battles that are also included in this book.

William Weir's "50 Battles that Changed the World" is a compilation of short blurbs on some of the most famous or important battles in world history. Although the book is informative and highlights some lesser-known battles, the battles lack context and he fails to explain why or how some of these battles "changed the world."

Each battle blurb is well-written, short, and informative. Each also includes a small entry on "What was at stake" in the battle. While well-written and informative, Weir too often makes minor factual errors or baseless assertions. For example, under "Cannae" he said that the "survival of Rome" was at stake; but Rome lost the battle and survived. His sole Civil War battle is Chickamauga, and he said that the "survival of the United States" was at stake; but again, the Union forces lost (an indecisive battle) yet the United States of course survived. He claims (falsely) that Hitler was treaty-bound to declare was on the US after Pearl Harbor, and he discusses the Battle of the Atlantic without discussing the key role played by the Ultra intercepts.

But ultimately where this book fails to deliver is that the 50 battles listed didn't change the world; or, if they did, Weir doesn't explain how. Was Chickamauga really history-changing? Or Cannae? (Especially because, as mentioned above, the winner of both of these battles lost the war.) Or the Battle of New Orleans, which was fought after the Treaty of Ghent had set the terms ending the War of 1812? Or many of the myriad lesser-known battles that he lists?

This book is a decent read with some nice, succinct histories of the various battles. However, this is amateur history written by an amateur historian.

History is about context, and Mr. Weir provides precious little for his 50 vignettes. For battles I was familiar with this was adequate, otherwise it was annoying or confusing. The book would benefit from additional historical, political, and cultural background. Also from maps, diagrams - anything making it clear how and why the battle "Changed the World".
I also didn't find any particular value in his ordering of battles by "importance" to the modern world. I suspect that writing the book was a rewarding personal endeavor, but reading it, not so much.

I am a military history fan and found this to be a delightfully succinct but thorough review of history's major battles, more than a few of which I had never heard of before. Enlightening for those who are curious about the world's evolution according to key battles which reshape the future in an often unanticipated way. Bud Lee, CA