Martin van Creveld

This is definitely the most interesting book about WW2 I’ve read. The setting is brilliant, and horrible, all at once. Hitler’s own thoughts on his life, as imagined by the author.

It is tough to read the (fictional) self-justification of a person responsible for so much death and misery, and that is also what is remarkable about this book. The author makes Hitler’s mind intelligible.

Rather than picturing him as the monstrous, unknowable evil, a kind of inhuman boogeyman, as Hitler is show more often portrayed, the author has managed to create a believable inner narrative, that explains the behaviour of the world’s most infamous dictator.

And that is an important perspective. While Hitler may or may not have gone insane at the end, most of the vile evils carried out by him and his party were not acts of madness, but rather calculated, well-planned actions.

War and genocide were not invented by the nazis, they were just frightfully efficient at it. It has happened many times before, and if we do not learn from history, understand what drives people to such extremes, it will happen again and again. A good place to start would be this book. Highly recommended. show less

Command in War is an extremely ambitious work of military history, a study of command over millennia and six major types of war, using case studies from antiquity, Napoleon's battle of Jena-Auerstedt, the Prussian-Austrian War, World War I, Israeli battles in 1967 and 1973, and Vietnam, to examine the organization, processes, and technologies of command.

The theory is extremely robust, if somewhat idiosyncratic and limited in scope. Van Creveld is interesting in how information is taken in by show more commanders and used to manage uncertainty, so that orders may be given to forces to destroy the enemy. The first and last chapters are particularly well-constructed, containing Van Creveld's general theories on the best organization of an armed force: tactically flexible, self-sufficient units, with just enough formal structure to manage their logistical needs, and loosely controlled with robust informal back-channels. All the technique and technology of modern command, control, and communications is of little help.

The case studies are more uneven in quality. The sections on ancient warfare and Napoleon are strongest. I have come to agree with Van Creveld that strategy before Napoleon was non-existent. The best that a commander could do was guess to place himself at the decisive point of a battle and bull through with sheer physical force. The limitations of horse couriers made actual control of a campaign from a central point impossible. The staff, such as it was, would consist of the commander's household and a Quartermaster General in charge of scouting, selecting where to camp, the baggage train, and all the millions of details that made up the army. Napoleon's staff was still bound to him personally (though by charisma rather than feudal obligation), but Napoleon standardized some procedures of strategic intelligence and was the first to successfully direct multiple independent formations towards a single strategic end, although even the master of warfare ("the most competent man who ever lived" by Van Creveld's estimation) forgot to give orders to a third of his forces at a crucial battle and essentially blundered into the enemy. Likewise, the Prussian General Staff was far less powerful and formalistic than common history suggests--more informal sinews that occasionally managed to bring divided corps together than autocratic masters of battle.

This book gives a good sense of the imaginative and elegant letters and brave cavalrymen that characterized Napoleon's campaigns, and the rising tide of paperwork and schedules that entirely failed to manage the chaos of trench warfare. Where it is weakest is in the modern sections. Radio-based mobile warfare is clearly new in its relative independence from fixed lines of communication and physical space, yet the treatment of the 1973 Yom Kippur War is reduced to incoherence and the psychology of the various Israeli commanders, when it could've been the most robust part of the book. Van Creveld has a better perspective on the Vietnam War, where colonels in helicopter turned the 'directed telescope of command' into a paralyzing instrument of over-control, and statistical methods directed the army into doing what could be measured rather than what mattered. The heart of modern warfare; fast-moving combined arms operations linked through the 'hot medium' of voice radio, is sadly absent from the book.

For what it's worth, the nods towards the visible future of command, via technologies like Blue Force Tracker and streaming video via drone, seem to have turned out to be mostly right, which is an worthy bit of foresight. The conclusion, that the problems of command are intractable, that centralization is as harmful to military operations as chaos, and that the burden of technology may be greater than the benefits, are likely eternal truths. show less

Martin van Creveld has written outstanding military history books. His book on military logistics is a classic. Unfortunately, he has been struck by a severe case of cooties. He now sees himself in a task to combat the uppity womenfolk who take away the jobs of the manly men and demand equality. In this book, he informs his readers that the Swedish men "actually prefer to have sex with animals than with Swedish women — a practice sufficiently common to given rise to legislation aimed at show more banning it." He found this "fact" in Conservapedia and the Daily Mail, both right-wing projects with a precarious link to reality. At present, it seems easier to restore Don Quixote to sanity rather than turn back van Creveld to productive reality-based research.

He is deeply afraid of the manly men becoming a minority faced with an unholy alliance of women, gays and foreigners. His examination of the impossible quest for equality thus has the underlying mission to show that those uppity women should accept the wonderful world of inequality of yesterday: "In all historically known societies, women have always been subordinated to men." To sustain his reactionary views, he parades all conservative political thinkers.

Unfortunately, he fails to presents any economic ideas such as the tragedy of the commons or the free-rider problem. The principle of equality means to treat equal things equally and unequal things unequally. To sustain any equality, a border between these two zones is necessary. Many conservatives have well understood this point and the US political and legal system is hard at work dismantling the protective laws that preserve a sliver of equality in the United States. A true history of equality would be an interesting book to read. Unfortunately, Martin van Creveld is no longer the man to write it. show less

Reading this volume on the heels of Jeremy Black's "Logistics: The Key to Victory" gave me a better perspective on military logistics than could be achieved in the later volume--I'll explain the why later in the review. Van Creveld's work is groundbreaking in three ways. First, he takes a long and unflinching look at a topic avoided by the vast majority of military historians. Second, he has the courage to revise decades and centuries-old thinking on military campaigns and leaders. Third, he show more applies statistical analysis (admittedly theoretical) to historical campaigns, which wither debunks conventional historical canon or alters the narrative.

Martin van Creveld is an Israeli military historian specializing in strategy, tactics, and logistics. Having received his PhD in History in 1971, he was still a young author when he penned "Supplying War", publishing the book with Cambridge University Press in 1977. This is a relatively slim book at 284 pages, including bibliography, endnotes, and index. There are only 8 chapters, each chapter containing four to seven titled subchapters. The 2004 second edition adds a postscript covering the 30 years between editions, including an analysis of the then new Revolution in Military Affairs. This review looks only at the first edition.

The book proceeds chronologically. Chapter 1 is introductory, discussing war as it developed in the Age of Gunpowder and Absolutism where plunder and magazines served as the bases for an organized army's logistics in the 17th and 18th century. Chapter 2 surveys the Napoleonic era, examining two specific campaigns--Austerlitz in 1805 and Russia in 1812--from a logistical perspective. Chapter 3 takes a look at Prussian Army logistics and the Etappen system of the mid-19th century, culminating in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War. The impact (or lack thereof) of the use of railroads in military logistics is the focus here.

Chapter 4 takes on the logistics of World War I's von Schlieffen plan along with von Moltke's modifications, where we see the railroad/motorized supply system for the first time. Chapter 5 concentrates on Germany's World War II Operation Barbarossa, where the Wehrmacht's partially motorized logistics system proved wanting in the vastness of Russia's sprawling landscape. Chapter 8 continues van Creveld's analysis of the Wehrmacht's logistics, this time with Romme's North African campaigns of 1941/42. There being no use for horse-borne logistics and with limited railway infrastructure in the desert, the Afrika Korps had to completely rely upon motorized transport to meet its logistics needs. Chapter 7 is about the Allied invasion of Northwest Europe in 1944, examining how the totally motorized Anglo-American armies under Eisenhower approached the invasion of Germany, with logistical analysis of the apparently never-ending broad front/narrow front debate that railed the Allied commanders in September 1944. Chapter 8 wraps up the author's case using elements from the previous chapters.

This was an interesting and challenging read--van Creveld is a demanding professor who expects his students to be well-read in military history. The book abounds in name-dropping, and the author does not spend the time to explain who these personalities are--so the reader should be prepared before embarking on this read to gain the most benefit. In Chapter 8, van Creveld makes a number of points, one of the most significant being his prediction that armies of the late 20th century are limited in their offensive operations to about 40 miles a day consistently. Interestingly, the US Army's ground forces in 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom could gain upwards of 60 miles a day; however, it took the better part of three weeks for the 3rd Division to move the roughly 400 miles between the Kuwaiti border berm and Baghdad, an average of perhaps 20 miles a day..

When compared with Black's work, "Supplying War" is still a hallmark work. I think Black got carried away in looking at all that van Creveld did not cover; after all, the earlier author admits that he limited his focus to come up with a readable volume. Black's book is well-nigh unreadable because it covers so much unfamiliar ground--the logistics in conflicts little-known in Western circles. Moreover, I find van Creveld's analysis more applicable to modern military logistics.

For a military historian, "Supplying War" is a must for the library. show less