Feeding Mars: Logistics In Western Warfare From The Middle Ages To The Present (History and Warfare)

I don’t usually buy collections of essays, but this one is pretty good. Individual articles cover logistics in the Byzantine empire, Pre-Crusade Europe, naval logistics in the 100 Years War (I learned that the Cinque Ports were granted immunity from customs duties in exchange for providing ships to the King for 15 days a year); 16th Century logistics in the Spanish navy (the single largest annual expenditure for the Spanish galley fleet was ship’s biscuit; because of the large crews of galleys, the Battle of Lepanto involved 160000 sailors, which had to be the greatest number of participants in a naval battle until the 20th century (Jutland? Leyte Gulf?); logistics in the campaigns of Louis XIV (the critical resource was not human show more food, or ammunition; it was fodder for horses. Armies frequently had to change position, not for maneuvering against the enemy but because they had exhausted local fodder. A wagon team carrying fodder to the front would eat its own load in fodder in three days.); logistics in the American Revolution (the critical resource was not supplies but transport; the road network in the Colonies was primitive and often close enough to the coast for the Royal Navy to interdict; prewar transport had depended heavily on coastal shipping); the Royal Navy in WWI (the RN consumed steel for warship building to the extent that it heavily impacted merchant ship construction, leading to the U-Boat crisis in 1917); the US Army’s experience with motor transport (the Quartermaster Corps wanted to build its own “perfect” trucks; eventually the powers that be insisted the Army use commercially available vehicles); and logistical difficulties in Vietnam.


Each essay is interesting; unfortunately, there’s no uniform theme, or any coverage of non-Western armies (I’d be very interested in how Chinese and Japanese armies handled supply). Still, quite worthwhile for all sorts of little facts. show less