Customer Reviews

The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(12)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

"The Hinge Factor" is an exercise in historical Monday-morning quarterbacking. In it Erik Durschmied, a former television war correspondent, describes 18 critical military engagements beginning with the Trojan hourse in 1184 BC and ending with the Gulf War. He then, equally briefly, gives what he thinks is the single "hinge factor" on which the battle turned. His subtitle "How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History" gives a clue to the kind of hinge he is talking about. In TV jargon I think this is called a hook.

Durschmied tells a good story -- quickly and yet colorfully. He shows us parts of the action through the eyes of specific participants -- including bits of dialogue that lend flavor to the scenes. (I was left wondering if these were authentic; they sound almost too cinematic for words found in soldiers' letters and diaries.) The best sections of the book are those Durschmied covered as a journalist himself -- especially the fighting in Hue during the Tet Offensive.

Durschmied's assessment is sometimes colored by his enthusiasms and his need for a hook. His description of the battle of Antietam mostly features courageous Confederates slaughtering ill-led Union troops. Some readers may be unprepared for his revelation at the end that Confederate casualties were substantially higher than those suffered by the Union army. He concludes it was a moral victory for General Lee. He ignores the fact that Lee lost an irreplaceable quarter of his army in a battle he needn't have fought, that he was forced to retreat back across the Potomac in the middle of the night nearly losing his entire artillery reserve in the process, and that his objective of fomenting an uprising among Confederate sympathizers in Maryland was thwarted by the battle. Durschmied compresses the complex motivations and movements of Russian and German forces that clashed in Prussia in August 1914 to just 17 pages. He distills the reason for the Russian defeat down to a single personality clash. When studied in detail, the history of great events is seldom that tidy.

Durschmied is clearly not writing for the serious student of history -- military or otherwise. The maps he provides are inadequate. They contain little topgraphical detail and geographic points mentioned in his text do not appear on the accompanying map. There are errors of fact that should have been caught by his editors. His bibliography is sketchy.

I bought this book because a friend said I would love it. He was right. The author takes some of histories greatest battles, and makes you relive them, one wonderful moment after another. The suspense never lets up. I could not put this book down. Once he has related the events, he clues you in on the stupidity, and then the moment of the battle which hinged on success or failure. This author has given me a completely new way to look at battles which I thought I really knew. It is refreshing, alarming, and yet captivating reading. Once he gets your interest in a new battle, he never lets up, and you can't stop reading. A must for military history buffs. Well worth twice the asking price.

A friend of mine told me about the premise of this book: that the outcome of many (even important) battles throughout history has been defined not by the military brilliance of the winners, but by the human weakness of the losers or just by luck.

I was intrigued by it, and read it (that is to say, I am not an specialist versed on military or history readings - you can see that if you click on my "other reviews").

I will be brief. What I liked about this book was:
- Nice set of chronologically ordered events, starting from Troy and finishing with the fall of the Berlin wall.
- The premise seems to be correct in most of the examples provided: yes, human beings are weak and, well, human. So, many battles were lost by arrogance, by abrupt changes in weather conditions, by miscommunication, etc.

The issues that bothered me whilst reading it were:
- Convoluted story-telling. The description of some battles was very difficult to follow. Sometimes I read them once, twice, could not fully understand the movements of the players, and at the end, just quit and kept going, following the major points but missing in some of the details that Mr. Durschmeid failed (imho) to convey appropriately.
- Horrible use of footnotes. I won't get into details here, but let's just say it's not clear to me who was thinking what about the footnotes in this book. Some are iterative, some could be in the text, some are inocuous references, some are translations and some are pretty much incomprehensible.
- Translations: in many instances Durschmeid failed to translate quotes from French or German military officers. So, his point was completely lost.
- Maps: yes, it is very convenient to use maps to help the readers understand the movement of troops in the battles; but, no, it is not wise to use a poorly designed and schematized map for each battle. Their value was many times diminished.

The four issues above seem like details, but their comeuppance again and again in this book make me feel as if was written in haste. I don't understand what was the rush, but clearly someone could have helped Mr. Durschmeid in making it more intelligible, more sharp, more thorough.

Read this if you're curious about the role of stupidity in warfare. It opens your eyes. In some occassions you may even laugh at what happened.

But, unless you're a scholar, or have the patience to read and re-read some paragraphs, you might feel dissappointed by the lack of quality in the book's form (not its content, which is fine).

Erik Durschmied has produced an entertaining and novel insight into the outcome of some famous military campaigns, focussing on the role played by chance. I found the partly anecdotal style interesting, and the footnotes reinforced the text with some additional detail. Durschmied's Austrian origin comes through with numerous footnotes in German. As a speaker of this language, these footnotes added another dimension. On the down side, I think Durschmeid's excellent theme begins to run out of steam in the later chapters. For example, the Hinge Factor given in the chapter about the Gulf War, "Blatant technological superiority", does not fall into the same category for me as weather or a swarm of bees. I would have found this to be an excellent book, but unfortunately it was marred for me by frequent errors of factual detail. Just two examples: in the Epilogue the author refers to the code name of the Hiroshima bomb as "Little Man". Tabun, the first nerve agent to be discovered, was found by accident in 1937 and not, as Durschmied tells us, "developed by German chemists at the end of World War 2". Many readers may not be fazed by such minor things. Maybe I'm nit-picking, but for me such things detract from the credibility of a book. An enjoyable read, all the same.

I've got to agree with reviewer Brent Wigen that The Hinge Factor is entertaining, interesting, but rather light. I much prefer Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly, which Durschmied must surely have known, using some of the same examples. Durschmied's work is a much quicker read, with more situations covered in less detail than Tuchman's. Durschmied is not a master of prose; he's readable, but somewhat awkward. Durschmied tries balance a statistical approach--so many men per side, so many tanks or calvalry, etc.--with an attempt to bring his reader to the immediacy of the situation, by reporting bits of first hand accounts of the battles. The result is sometimes too fragmentary to read well, and I felt bogged down with unnecessary details and some outright oddities...why describe the speed of one ship in miles per hour, then in the next sentence compare it with another ship's speed in kilometers per hour? I honestly had trouble following his description of the Gulf War, and I was alive and adult during it--I can't say that I agree with his conclusions about it, especially given the current situation in Iraq. Another annoyance concerns language--sometimes quotations are given in their original language, sometimes not...sometimes translations are given, sometimes not...I know, Americans are coddled and should be multilingual, but really, how many people in the world know Askati? But most problematic is the outright simplification in order to make Durschmied's point that a single factor changed the course of events. To his credit, at the end of chapters he sometimes contradicts that simplification that he seemed to be making, in "What If" and "The Facts" summaries...but then that in itself seems most strange. So...

What If
Erik Durschmied had had a better editor, or been a native English speaker?

The Facts
The book would have read more smoothly, and conveyed more information; perhaps it would have garnered more stars at Amazon and more sales. But as it is, it's still worth reading for casual history buffs. Serious history researchers will be disappointed. See Tuchman's The Zimmerman Telegram for a very in depth study of a real hinge factor.

The Hinge Factor relates some important events in history as entertaining anecdotes. The book does live up to it's subtitle "How chance and stupidity have changed history". Each of the anecdotes shows how chance or someone's stupid decision changed the outcome of an important historical event. A number of unrelated historical events were chosen as examples.

That is actually the biggest problem with the book. While each example stands on its own, there is no attempt to draw the piece together into a coherent whole. No lessons are drawn. The book comes to no conclusion. Perhaps the author intended that the lessons be clear to the reader from the stories he chose. If so I missed it.

In fact I do not believe the author had any lesson in mind. The events described were chosen for their entertainment value, not for any educational purpose. If that is the authors goal, I would say it was a moderate success.

Durschmied is a television corespondent. That witting style is reflected in The Hinge Factor. Each of the seventeen short vignettes is filled with action and keeps a fast pace. The author never gets boughed down in details or pesky facts. Since each story stands on its own, it is easy to pick the book up and read any one at random. The helps the book server as an occasional diversion.

Stay away from this childish effort to write about history. The book is not history. It is a vain and foolish effort to say something in a very short space about an important issue: some factors affecting conflict throughout what has (or has not) happened in the past. The book is badly and carelessly written. It reminds one of reductionist glosses of the past (in both senses of the term "past.") If intended for juveniles, one hopes their interest suffices to discourage them from taking this seriously. Even the title is ill-conceived. There is no single "hinge factor." The subtitle already makes this clear: "chance and stupidity" are the alleged hinges. Some of the contents, such as they are, themselves challenge the sufficiency of these two, either as factors or as reasons for the book.

More annoying -- the proper term for this nonsense! -- is that it pretends to be a history of "what if." Counterfactual thinking is too important to be left to such muddled meddling into the question, are or were there choices other than those pursued in conflict? Analysis, such as it is, is squeezed into short paragraphs.

Finally, the author has no understanding of "what if" means and suggests it must mean the opposite of what happened. He is genuinely ignorant of "fuzzy thinking" as it might properly be used in the cases he attempts to limn. He remains bound to the Aristotelian logic of either-or. In fact, each of the cases he attempts to present permits of several alternatives. The potential purchaser (including libraries), however, has an easier choice: to buy or not to buy. Don't.

In this book, the author takes seventeen situations (sixteen battles and the non-violent collapse of East Germany), and shows how things other than military brilliance brought the situation to its climax. Sometimes it was stupidity, sometimes it was arrogance, and one time it was the lack of some nails!

The narrative of each story is well written and presented in all of its fascination. What I liked about this book was that the author presented a number of battles that I have never bothered to read about before, and includes many details that I had never encountered about the ones I had read! I highly recommend this book

In case it helps your decision, the chapters are on Troy (1184 BC), Hattin (1187), Agincourt (1415), Karansebes (1788), Waterloo (1815), Balaclava (1854), Antietam (1862) Koniggratz (1866), Spioen Kop (1900), Tannenberg (1914), Tanga (1914), France (1940), North Atlantic (1941), Moscow (1941), Vietnam (1968), Berlin (1989), and the Persian Gulf (1991).

Durschmied has put together an interesting compilation of historic encounters that entertains as it educates. Nonetheless, how the pitifully inadequate maps made it past his editor is another question. One wonders whether such poor illustrations are in fact the hinge factor that relegates this book to the middling category.

This book has enormous potential and could have been brilliant. Selecting battles and working out what keys could have turned when. Yet the author does not examine the implications fully. His account of Agincourt is excellent, but in others he is on very weak ground. Can we really argue that Hitler would have won the second world war if he didn't pause for three days with his panzer divisions in France. Isn't it far more likely that he was so self destructive that eventually a coalition would have been formed to destroy him. Hitler invaded Russia when Britian was on its knees and declared war on the United States for no real reason, wasn't that a key factor. In a desperate war he spent massive resources in his insane quest to eliminate the Jewish population. He also ignored the potential of the 'Jewish science' of nuclear phyisics. Hitler could not keep Italy in check and it led to an absurd invasion of Yugoslavia and Greece which derailed the invasion of Russia. Yes, chance plays a role in history but can it change long term historical forces. A far better body of work on similar topic is the British Televison Series Great Military Blunders which covers the same terrain and makes a more sophisticated analysis. A good and fun read but it really needed more rigour and analysis than provided here.