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46 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
An Anti-American Polemic, June 1, 2007
Prior to reading the Changing Face of War, I regarded Martin van Creveld as a gifted military historian, particularly for his Supplying War. However, van Creveld's latest book is riddled with factual errors and biased, unsupported conclusions. Readers should be quick to note the complete absence of charts, tables, maps or appendices to support the author's arguments. Instead of finding incisive historical insight, I found this to be a poorly-researched effort, with weak arguments, badly argued.
The Changing Face of War consists of seven chapters, each covering a major period of military history since 1900. To be fair, the first two chapters covering 1900-1918 are interesting, but these chapters seem more like synthesis of existing historical opinion rather than fresh analysis. Furthermore, the fact that the author dismisses the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War as irrelevant gives an early indication about the author's suspect methodology. It's in the third chapter, on the period 1919-1939, that the book begins to change from history to polemic. The author displays a marked tendency to use derogatory stereotypes, twice referring to Italian soldiers as "cowards" and British officers as "Colonel Blimps." This tendency to use stereotypes and generalizations grows worse as the book progresses, until one can actually sense the author's loathing. By the time that he reaches the chapter on World War II, the author is content to synthesize Keegan et al, adding nothing original of his own.
Throughout this book, I was disturbed by the large number of factual errors, that could have been avoided with even cursory research of standard secondary sources. I counted at least 26 significant errors, but I can only highlight a few here:
1. pp. 48, "trench systems [in WW I] were completed by the laying of millions upon millions of mines..." [anti-personnel mines not developed until the 1930s]
2. pp. 103, "France never built or completed a carrier." [the carrier Bearn was completed in 1935].
3. pp. 108, claims the French air force avoided combat in 1940 [In fact, France lost 294 fighters in air-air combat in 1940 and shot down over 300 Luftwaffe aircraft].
4. pp. 109, "In 1939, the Poles tried to use horses against German tanks." [this time-worn propaganda has long been discounted].
5. pp. 116, "the Battle of Annual in May 1921" [actually July 21, 1921].
6. pp. 126, "most Polish aircraft were destroyed on the ground." [only 24 of 260 lost were destroyed on ground].
7. pp. 130, "the Luftwaffe destroyed some 8,000 aircraft" on the first day of Operation Barbarossa. [more like 1,200].
8. pp. 130, "Army Group North reached the outskirts of Leningrad by July 10, 1941.." [it was early September 1941].
9. pp. 139, claims only 3 Japanese carriers sunk at Midway [it was 4].
10. pp. 159, "When US troops entered Aachen in October 1944, they found it deserted even by the birds." [U.S. troops found 7,000 civilians in Aachen].
11. pp. 161, says General McNair was killed by bombardment for Operation Goodwood [it was Cobra].
It is in the fifth chapter, on the Cold War, that the author shows his true colors. He writes that, "the Americans were much more aggressive" than the Communists (ignoring Communist aggression in Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan). Van Creveld clearly sees America as a menace, claiming that long before President Bush, "the United States has behaved less responsibly than any other country on earth." He derides Americans, "who see their country as uniquely chosen and uniquely moral." At one point he compares American methods with Nazi methods and says at least the Nazis weren't hypocrites. He then goes on to praise North Korean and Iran for standing up to the United States, saying "Pyongyang's apparent decision to go nuclear makes perfect sense" and "whoever rules in Tehran has excellent reason to build such weapons as fast as possible." Readers should realize by this point that the author has embarked upon a polemical tirade, axe in hand to slay the American Ogre, and that the history lesson has stopped.
Of course, the whole purpose of this book was to give the author a scholarly platform to bash the U.S. war in Iraq, which he does with great glee. First, the author makes the general argument that since 1945, regular armies have an unbroken record of defeat by insurgents and terrorists. This begs the question, why spend more than half the work discussing pre-1945 warfare or naval warfare, which have little to do with counter-insurgency. Second, the author argues that the U.S. has learned nothing from the conflicts in Algeria or Vietnam and that it cannot win in Iraq.
It is apparent that the author is very ignorant about the course of the war in Iraq, since he seems to feel that U.S. troops there are the same kind of disgruntled, pot-smoking draftees as 1968. He feels that the US Army in Iraq was already demoralized by 2004 although if this were true, why would amputees be fighting to get back to the war? Van Creveld also fails to look at the insurgents and see their problems, such as the increasing difficulty in getting more suicide volunteers or lack of a political program. It is unfortunate that the author has written this book, because he could have added something to the debate on Iraq with a bit of research and self-restraint, but instead he chose to indulge in America-bashing and irresponsible generalizations.
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34 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Major Disappointment, March 12, 2007
I am a longtime fan of Van Creveld's but I have to admit that this book was a big let-down. While he makes a number of very cogent points, as always, I have to suspect that he has developed a political agenda that I have never noticed before. He makes a number of broad assertions, especially about U.S. policy, without providing any of his usual supporting data, that I found troubling. The most blatant was his claim that U.S. defense spending has pushed America to the brink of bankruptcy. With a thriving economy and defense spending at less that 5% of GDP, I don't know where he gets this. This rate compares favorably to 8% during the Reagan build-up or even the 6% of the Carter demolition of defense. There were also a number of minor but bizarre factual errors like claimnig that it was American paratroopers who were massacred at Arnhem (they were British); that the 101st Airmobile dropped into Iraq (It was the 73rd Airborne since the 101st hasn't had paratroopers for a generation); and that Pakistan had achieved "nuclear parity" in 1974 when they didn't explode a bomb until 1999. One wonders how many other mistakes he made in areas where I didn't happen to know the truth. His worst comment was that Western intelligence had "manufactured WMDs (for Saddam) out of thin air." I guess all those dead Kurds should quit faking and the UN inspectors who inventoried 27,000 liters of Anthrax in 1993 (which subsequently disappeared) had been bought off by Halliburton. You might question the necessity of going to war in 2003, but even Cindy Sheehan hasn't been this far off the mark.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Eh, it's ok., June 26, 2007
I had high hopes for this book, but it let me down, perhaps because I was led to believe the author would opine on strategy which he did not frequently do. His writing style is a little difficult to follow and I blame the editor for this. Van Creveld did not do a lot to string together what worked, what failed, and what might have been done differently. I thought I would blow through it as a page turner, but it ended up taking me over a month because it was kind of boring.
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