Hubris: the Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century by Alistair Horne
New York: Harper, 2015 ISBN 9780062397805
Those few who regularly read my blog will know that I've read a few books written by Alistair Horne, and enjoyed them all. I enjoyed this one too, as it is well written and informative, but I must state that I found the premise of the book a little thin. Horne, in his introduction to Hubris, states his aim to be to show how that state of over-confidence can lead to disaster, and how, often after a great victory, hubris creeps in and infects (Horne likens it to a virus) the body politic and the body military and leads to inevitable downfall.
To illustrate his point he chooses key battles from the first half of the Twentieth Century, Tsushima, Nomonhan, Moscow, Midway, MacArthur in Korea, and the battle of Dien Bien Phu. His contention is that in each case it was hubris that led to defeat, and that victory could lead to the development of hubris in the winners. This theory is fairly self-evident to any serious student of military history, and Horne does not add significantly to thinking in this area in my opinion.
Nevertheless, he does show the links between Japan's victory in 1905 and their over-confidence in Mongolia in 1939 and at Midway in 1942. America's crushing of Japan can be argued to have instilled a sense of inevitability to the United States and MacArthur's view that the Korean War would lead to a speedy victory; and the similar racist views of the French (as well as their internecine bickering and arrogance) led them to grievously underestimate the Viet Minh and General Giap.
Although Horne only touches on them, to me two other themes loom large in this book - racism, and ruthlessness. Much of the hubris shown by the Russians, Germans, Americans and French was engendered by their racist view of their opponents. European commanders - and political leaders for that matter - had a very dim view of their Asian brothers. What is fascinating to see is how these views remained unchanged, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Japan in particular suffered from European scorn, despite destroying the Russian Fleet in 1905 and conquering Manchuria and Korea after that. This meant little to the Americans and British who continued to see the Japanese and other Asians as less than human.
This racism led directly to their hubris when facing the "Asian hordes", as did their lack of understanding of the ruthlessness of their foes. Both MacArthur, and the various French leaders in Indochina (the revolving door of French military leadership at the time surely didn't help their cause) looked at their opponents through their own eyes. They failed to understand that the North Koreans, Vietnamese and Chinese were prepared to sustain much greater casualties than their Western counterparts could bear, and, although they may not have had the latest technology, they had a greater will.
No-one was more ruthless than Stalin. Unlike his Western "comrades" of World War Two, he had no racist limits to his thinking, so when Japanese troops encroached on his Mongolian border, he threw in his best troops, his best tanks, and Zhukov, his best general. In fact, when it came to the battle of Nomonhan, it was the Japanese who underestimated their Slavic opponents - not racially, but ideologically. Stalin smashed them, as he eventually smashed Hitler. Hitler's hubris came from his victory in France, and his racially inspired theories that led him to think that the Russians were less than human. Stalin was prepared to not only destroy his country to deny it to Hitler, but send millions of his countrymen and women to their deaths to stop him.
While Hitler was just as ruthless than Stalin, he didn't have as many men to sacrifice, and so lost.
As always, Horne writes smoothly and well - Tsushima is fading into history, and Nomonhan has always been obscure, so to re-read the narratives of those battles is pleasing. Horne provides good context for those battles and the others he discusses. He uses his narrative flair to take the reader right into the history of each battle, but his theoretical strength is less gripping; at times the hubris angle seems tacked on, or an afterthought to his racing narrative history.
So, what to make of this book? As narrative history it's gripping, as a theoretical work less so. I note that some of this book first appeared in the Military History Quarterly, and that makes sense to me, as I think the issue with this book is the lack of connexion throughout the book. It seems that Horne may have thought of these episodes separately and tacked them together. Perhaps I'm doing him a dis-service but, for me, this book was less than I hoped for given how it was marketed, but still was a good read.
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