Customer Reviews

Alexander 334-323 BC: Conquest of the Persian Empire (Campaign)

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One of the better books of the Osprey Campaign series, this book gives a concise and yet fairly comphrehensive account of the strategies and tactics involved in the campaigns and battles of alexander the great. The key battles of the campaign are well illustrated and easy to follow. The book is an excellent and informative introduction to the full scope of Alexander's political, strategic, and tactical genius.

I've read 5-6 books on Alexander the Great, but never really understood the sequence of the battles between the Macedonians and the armies of Asia. This book laid them out in great detail! I wish I would have had this book before I read the others. My understanding of Alexander's campaigns would have been much clearer. It doesn't go into a lot of detail, but it does highlight the important facts. Highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Alexander the Great!

If you want a comprehensive analysis, with explications of the army's and the leaders, with maps and graphics in color, explaining the tactics and strategies involved in this battles... THIS IS YOUR BOOK. Very simple to understand, and very complete review.

Also try "Cannae 216 B.C." - Hannibal's campaign against Rome, other excelent book

Alexander 334-323 BC: Conquest of the Persian Empire (Campaign Series 7) by John Warry is one of the best of the Osprey Campaign Series. Unlike most to the other books, Alexander does not focus on a given battle or a series of battles, but on the almost decade long conquest of Persia and neighboring countries, such as parts of India. If one is looking for an overview of Alexander's conquests then there is probably no better book. The battles are described in such a manner as to acquaint the reader with the ins and outs and the maps are beyond excellent.

Warry does a fine job in explaining how 50,000 infantry and cavalry troops were able to defeat an empire with troops several times their number. Focusing on the the tactical brilliance of Alexander and the innovations in battle field technologies, the book explains why Alexander was victorious. It is written in a readable fashion and is a good place to start for anyone who is interested in the conquests of Alexander.

Don't let the size of this book fool you---the point of reading is to understand and this is the best book I've read that puts Alexander the Great's campaigns together in a way that military professionals and casual readers can understand. Every war form we use today has its antecedent in the past--there is a lot to learn from the past if we take the time to reflect on it.

Warry shows some remarkable things--that Alexander's Army of 40,000 defeated a Persian Army of 600,000 and did it with almost no casualties because in ancient war shields defeated arrows and spears. The Macedonian phalanx--a formation of men with shields linked together would close on the enemy at foot speed led by Parmenio, while Alexander surged ahead with his cavalry and collapsed his enemy while the phalanx held the enemy. Think of how Commanders combined their arms in the film, Braveheart to see how Alexander waited until the time was right before placing himself and his Cavalry force at the critical spot to smash his enemy's structure. It was when enemy cohesion and formations collapsed---when they threw down their shields and ran---that the high casualties we usually associate with 1st Generation muscle-powered combat come from. That we are having too many casualties on the modern, automatic weapons fire swept battlefield, means its high time we re-examine the individual Soldier shield to recreate a phalanx capability today.

When Alexander confronted the walled island city of Tyre/Sidon he built siege engines on both ships and rolled across a causeway of land he built by throwing stones into the sea as foretold in the Bible in Ezekiel 26. Warry shows the siege in amazing detailed, color illustrations that enlighten without boring the reader as a dry "scholarly" book tends to do. He then marched across the known world at amazing march speeds--Warry describes the weaponry/equipment in great deatil--you'll notice the macedonians wore a "himation" which could be used both as a sleeping blanket and as a coat--there was no wasted weight being carried on the Soldier's back--a lesson we could stand to relearn today.

Reading Warry's book with its long-range and close-up maps and illustrations from ancient engravings and modern depictions is like an inter-active computer simulation of the battle---you can see both the "big" picture and the "little" picture, in short this book is a masterpiece. We need to re-evaluate our views that for a book to be "accurate" it has to be visually dull, especially in the computer age we live in where we can with hyperlinks go to an entire world of background information from all walks of life on any given subject.

John Warry's Osprey book is a fairly typical condensed account of Alexander's most important battles; Granicus, Issus, Tyre, Gaugamela, and the Hydaspes. This is a solid but uninventive source, most of its information being availible in dozens of other books and in greater depth. The bird's eye maps of the Campaign series are of poor quality here (due at least in part to this being one of the first Campaign titles) though they suit their purpose well enough. One little detail this title does contain that many do not are several uncommon color illustrations of Indian warriors of Porus' Army (a topic Osprey really needs to do a book on).

Overall, this is a decent quality source on Alexander by an experienced researcher of the Classical Art of War, but don't expect a huge amount of detail or any startling new revelations.

This is an excellent place to start for the student of Alexander's campaigns. Provides information useful for students, wargaming and other hobby enthusiasts. Quite readable, extends into Alexanders Indian campaigns.

Alexander, king of Macedonia and conqueror in a very few years of a large fraction of the known world, has been a mythic figure for 2,300 years, even among his enemies. The campaigns he pursued and the many battles (and hundreds of skirmishes) through which he led his Macedonians, Greeks, and allied peoples are really too many -- and too varied in type, terrain, and goal -- to be covered in sufficient depth in ninety-six pages. The other volumes in this and Osprey's other series are much more focused in time and geography. The author is therefore forced to select only five battles spread over the eleven years and several thousand miles of Alexander's career. The fight against the Persian forces at Granicus, shortly after his army crossed the Hellespont, was his first major victory and the first example of the efficacy of his style of Heroic Leadership. The confrontation at Issus, on the coast near what is now the Turkish-Syrian frontier, allowed him to push on down the coast to Tyre, where his innovative use of a mole to besiege the island fortress enabled him to gain control of the entire eastern Mediterranean as far as the borders of Libya. The book then skips ahead to Gaugamela in present-day Iraq, and finishes up with Hydaspes five years later, on a branch of the Indus -- the point farthest east that Alexander was able to push to. The detail is pretty good, though there is simply a lack of surviving information about many aspects of all five battles. The battle maps are excellent, as always, but the color plates depicting the garb and weapons of individual warriors and soldiers -- usually painted, but here in shaded colored pencil -- are decidedly inferior to other Osprey books. This is one of the less successful entries in the series.

It is a very interesting book. But it is written from the Greeks point of view about the Persians. For examole, it is well accepted by modern historians that the Persian army was not 600,000 men and yet the author fails to mention this and just repeats the old fictional account that was passed on from the past. However, I recommend this book for anyone interested on ancient history and Alexander the great. But it is a bit bias.