Customer Reviews

Military Blunders: The How and Why of Military Failure

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Soviet troops were "Asiatics of low intelligence." Such-and-such a people were eager to "throw off the yolk [sic] of oppression." Didn't this guy at least have an editor? Generalizations, shoddy writing, error after error, this book is shallow, unresearched, and badly organized. Better history can be found at your local library. Skip it.

This book splits the blame for various military blunders into various categories such as: - Failure of leadership; - Failure of the troops; - Planning for failure etc. It then goes on to give examples of each blunder.

The book does not explain how and it does not explain why it merely provides a synopsis of the battle from secondary and tertiary sources along with a classification of "main blunder".

Personally I do not even agree with many of the categorisations. When in the chapter discussing the poor quality of certain bodies of troops it is clear that the main cause of their failure is often in the leadership. For example Mr David blames the New Zealanders and their poor quality for the loss of Crete in 1941. Mr David himself places the blame on the leadership in the text of the chapter. There is nothing in the text to support his contention that the bulk of the forces were of poor quality except for reference to a single tank commander refusing to go forward without support. I am not sure that the commander of the vehicle was even a New Zealander. To the best of my knowledge there were no New Zealand armoured formations present so it is likely that they were British. His hammering of the leadership is probably justified but that was not the point he was trying to make.

In addition he makes bold, unsupported and racially predjudiced statements. It particular he denigrates the intelligence (mental not military)of Soviet forces opposing the Germans at Stalingrad. They might have been uneducated but this is not a reflection on their intelligence. The statement does not even add to the argument he was putting forward concerning. As a commander I would not care about the intelligence of my troops as long as they fought well. IQ is irrelevant.

There are much better books on this subject. Try "On the Psychology of Military Incompetance" by Norman Dixson. Mr David even uses it as a reference and recommends it himself. It will be in print long after this one has been remaindered.

The book seems ok for those who want a basic, cursory overview of many blunders, but a well-read student of war strategy would be very disappointed. A large problem, especially in a basic text, is that the writings were not accompanied by sufficient diagrams and graphics. This is especially evident when the minutia of troop movements and geographies are discussed.

This seems to be a cut and paste job of outdated sources. For instance, he again trots out the old "With the guns pointing the wrong way, the island was virtually defenseless..." (p. 67) routine. His sources are 2, from 1983 and 1970. Anyone seriously interested in this should read Operation Matador by Ong Chit Chung (Times Academic Press 1997) which very clearly shows the British high command had realized for many years that only way to defend Singapore from the Malaysian side was by by stopping the enemy on the peninsula, well short of Singapore. But even more egregious is failing the simple fact-checking exercise of where "the guns" pointed: 3 of 5 of the 15-inch guns, all 6 of the 9.2-inch, and all 18 of the 6-inch guns in fact had 360 degree traverse. Their actual problem was a lack of HE rounds, most of the ammo being of the armour-piercing variety and thus less effective against troops. If you bought this book, try and unload it at a second-hand store.

After reading one of the latest books on the Custer debacle (by Fox), this book came up well short in conveying to the reader the occurences of the Custer battle. In fact, the occurences that the author stated as objective fact have been disproven by archaelogical research, Indian accounts of the battle as well as the basic understanding of U.S. Cavalry tactics. I'd recommend that readers look elsewhere should they be interested in gaining any insight into these events.