The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History

An interesting idea, but a deeply flawed execution. Also, would it kill the publisher to find a better set of maps? ( )

Substance: Interesting, brief accounts of major battles (or wars) in world history concentrating on the "hinges" - the events and decisions that directly or obliquely determined the outcomes. Despite the author's preface, a knowledge of human psychology makes most of the decisions taken in reaction to the "unlikely" events sadly predictable. Take-away lesson: dysfunctional people get other people killed.
Most of the analyses are not new, but the compact collection is useful. Useful bibliography.

Style: English is not Durschmied's native tongue and it occasionally shows in his choice of words and phrases (although the lexical and grammatical mistakes are generally no worse than are frequently found these days in almost every medium). He has the same annoying habit as do most writers who include maps, namely, failing to include all of the places referenced in the text, or using different names for some of them.

Battles include: Troy, 1184 BC, defeat due to incautious pride, hinge factor = stratagem ; Horns of Hattin (Crusades), 1187, defeat due to arrogance and bad counsel, hinge factor + the desert; Agincourt, 1415, defeat due to bad weather and arrogant stupidity); Karansebes (Austria v. Prussia), 1788, defeat by organizational defects resulting in panic, hinge factor = a barrel of schnapps; Waterloo, 1815, defeat due to incompetence, victory due to luck and determination, hinge factor = lack of nails to spike cannon; Balaclava (Charge of the Light Brigade), 1854, defeat due to stubborn pride, impetuous arrogance, and stupidity, hinge factor = badly worded order; Antietam (US), 1862, defeat due to revelation of plans to the enemy (who passed up chance for decisive victory), hinge factor = loss of cigars wrapped with the plans; Königgrätz (Austro-Prussian War), 1866, defeat due to incompetence of officer corps and misplaced priorities (drill over training), hinge factor = disobedience of orders by Austrian counts (oddly, victory of the Prussians turned on an accidental disobedience to the timing plan); Spioen Kop (Boer War), 1900, defeat due to failure of British commanders to adjust to "rat pack" opponents, hinge factor = smokeless gunpowder; Tannenberg, 1914, defeat due to personal hatred between Russian generals (and stupidity in forcing them to work together), hinge factor = witness by German officer of the original face-slapping incident; Tanga, 1914; France (Dunkirk), 1940, defeat due to Hitler's fear of losing an elite force, hinge factor = sacrifice attack by British tanks that caused Hitler's panic; sinking the Bismarck, 1940, defeat due to failure to refuel Bismarck, victory due to US pilot's luck in not getting hit, hinge factor = lucky hit by British torpedo; Moscow (double-agent Sorge in Japan), 1941, German defeat due to delays in attack, Russian victory due to moving troops from East to West , hinge factor = Stalin's trust in his spy; Vietnam (Tet offensive and murdered VC photo), 1968, US defeat was political not military, due to open reporting of events (and Cronkite's defeatist agenda), hinge factor = photo of one stupid action, among many; Berlin Wall, 1989, defeat of East due to guards confusion about visas, hinge factor = unguarded statement by Party boss; Gulf War I, 1991, defeat of Iraq due to miscalculation of American will and capability plus arrogance, hinge factor = overwhelming technical and technological superiority.

NOTES:

P. xv: "History bears witness. Great armed hosts have been defeated through the stupidity and the incompetence of their leaders. War is not about trumpets and military glory, war is about death. Or, to paraphrase Georges Clemenceau, ...:'War is muh too important to be left to generals.' ...many battles have been decided by the caprice of weather, bad (or good) intelligence, unexpected heroism or individual incompetence -- in other words, the unpredictable. ... In many cases , the scenario leading up to disaster has been assembled well before the play was ever written. The annals of war are loaded with examples which prove that incompetence is (most of the time) not due to a failure of intelligence, but of character. Wooden-headedness, while assessing a rapidly developing situation in terms of preconceived fixed ideas, is invariably a good reason for downfall. Time and time again, brave men have been thrown away in reckless attacks. Orders given not from a clear perception of the situation, but from ignorance, spite or simply to achieve personal glory."
P. xvii: "Reading about a particular combat many years after the event, sometimes turns into a complex problem of separating a reliable source from poetic licence. At the abyss of disaster prevailing conditions of unbiased reporting can be, at best, chaotic and records incomplete or perhaps they have disappeared altogether. Others may have been falsified by contemporary chroniclers and poets for reasons of their own. That goes for yesterday as it does for today."
(Anyone reading contemporary news accounts of any political event, much less a war or battle, should be aware that the chroniclers are spinning the facts for their own purposes, and the truth is not always the winning version.) ( )

I didn't read all of this book: mostly I only skimmed it, because I didn't like it.

Firstly, I didn't realize it was *only* about military history -- which I'm not madly interested in.

Most importantly though, it contains a lot of unnecessary dramatization (that is, words put into historical characters' mouths) which confuses the issue as it's never clear what is from some reliable source and what is just made up. This really annoys me in a book about history, and I think it's very bad practice, so I feel justified in slamming the book despite having only skimmed through it. ( )

I jumped around a bit in the book as there were certain situations that were more interesting or better known to me. As I had just finished The Rose of Sebastopol, it seemed best to start with The Fourth Order (Balaklava) and as the fall of the Berlin Wall was one of THE most important events of my childhood, the second last section was next. The stupidity of generals, unsuitable men or men blind to the reality around them, if they were even anywhere near the battle. Another aspect that Durschmied shows us is the development of warfare.

Not always fantastically written, but good as a way to get into the subject. ( )

I really got sucked in by the intro. The author explains The Hinge Factor by telling the story of how Hiroshima became the first sight for the dropping of the Atomic bomb. It was number three on the list. The first two cities were obscured by clouds. The fate of a city was decided by the vagaries of weather.

What a great way to describe what the Hinge Factor is. What a let down to read the rest of the book. What follows is a list of battles (from Troy to Iraq) which does not feel in-depth enough to be of any use to the historian, but too detailed for others. In general, the hinge effect that is described feels forced, as if they were found to make an excuse for including each battle. And, after a while, all the battles blur into one. The book is at its best during WWII. But it starts poorly with myth as history (the fall of Troy) and falls apart again with more recent history. In particular, it feels like a hinge factor was made up for the Tet offensive, just so the author could tell his personal story as a reporter in Vietnam. (Quick aside – his story is very compelling. He tells it well and his journalistic skills are put on best display. I do not blame him for wanting to share the story. I just don’t think this is the way to do it.) The book gets way to preachy in the Epilogue where we get to visit Hiroshima again and he warns us of the perils of nuclear war.

There is a good subject in here somewhere – maybe better if written by a true historian rather than a correspondent. But the numbing rehashing of facts, the redundantly parallel construction of each chapter (tell a vivid detailed story about the conflict, then describe the entire conflict, then try to show a hinge factor, then try to talk about how the world would have been different), and the final preachiness just take too much away from the subject. ( )