Customer Reviews

The Dawn of Modern Warfare: History of the Art of War, Volume IV

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Delbruk, as a one time tutor to Kaiser Frederick's youngest son, had a unique opportunity to observe the high water mark of Prussian military achievement and also to witness its collapse in World War I. He published this last volume of his masterwork in 1919, but he ended his study of "modern" war with the wars of Napoleon and the scholarship of Clausewitz. "What followed," he wrote, "included in the phenomenal rise of Prussia and its final collapse will have to be undertaken later by others." Perhaps it was too painful, or perhaps he realized that he was too close to the events to be able to give an unbiased analysis. Whatever the reason, had he undertaken to write he would surely have made a valuable contribution to the military scholarship of World War I.

As he had done in his three previous volumes, Delbruk again gives a fresh, insightful analysis of the dawn of modern war, but in this volume he also gives good studies of some of the early practitioners and theorists of the the early modern era. (E.g., Gustavus Adolphus, Cromwell, Machiavelli, and Clausewitz).

Delbruk, having proclaimed in Volume III that cavalry didn't exist during the Middle Ages, gives a lucid account of how cavalry came to replace chivalry. Delbruk adds an interesting commentary on the matter of cavalryman versus knight when he describes knightly encounters with cavalry during the Huguenot wars. The French knights hated discipline and pistols, considering both things unchivalrous. Their enemies' lowborn cavalrymen disdained neither, and consequently the French knights repeatedly experienced the agony of defeat.

Delbruck's conclusion, though weak, is excellent. No one has ever done a better analysis of Renaissance warfare. On the other hand, though, his treatment of the Thirty Years War was appalling. Had he gone back to the basics and dealt with this war in the same manner he did the Punic Wars in Volume One, this could have been the best volume. Additionally, he failed to do any real analysis of the Napoleonic wars. No contemporary history of early modern warfare would completely ignore the Peninsular Wars.

Delbruck's narrow focus is offset, though, by his snubbing of both Napoleon and Wellington.

His conclusion is weak, but it should be kept in mind that, due to his interruption by WWI, he was not able to take it as far as he wanted. It is easy to sense that the German failure in WWI changed some of his views on nineteenth-century warfare, and he could not write about it.