“The Allure of Battle” by Cathal Nolan

The Allure of Battle, Cathal J. Nolan, Oxford University Press, 2017.  728pp.

In The Allure of Battle, Cathal Nolan purports to tell the reader “How Wars Have [really] Been Won And Lost”.  His basic answer is “attrition”, and he goes a little further and asserts that attempts to resolve wars via decisive battles a la the recommendations of Clausewitz tend to devolve into attrition.  Basically, says Nolan, long wars always end up as wars of attrition, and states that attempt to start small, winnable wars typically end up fighting long wars to their disadvantage.   Over hundreds of pages, Nolan does an admirable job of demonstrating that Napoleon and Hitler were megalomaniacs who pushed their finite military resources beyond any sensible limits, as were other military leaders to lesser degrees.  He ultimately has nothing new to say, unfortunately.

Nolan starts with ancient history, where he makes the claim that a) battles don’t decide war (he uses Marathon as an example, albeit not with any particular facility) b) the key to Rome’s military power was its administrative & governmental efficiency – the ability to recruit, train, and motivate large armies as needed – rather than its ability to win battles.  The First Punic War against Hannibal, with its famous Fabian Strategy, forms the keystone of his argument.  That Hannibal knew how to gain a victory, but not to use it is not exactly a new observation.  Nolan’s writing about Rome is entirely descriptive.  Taken at face value, it does not explain why Rome subdued Gaul but never Germania, or for that matter Parthia.

I’m going to point out here, as Nolan does in his introduction, that he did not write a particularly technical book.  Someone with no familiarity of military history should be able to read it without ever having to consult another work.  But that’s not excuse for superficiality.  While both professional historians and military men may entangle themselves within obscure issues, Nolan doesn’t get down in the muck enough.  The Rise and Fall of Rome is, of course, a very complex matter.  Nolan can’t say too much about it without either absurd reduction or massive digression.  However, he does a very poor job of addressing competing arguments.  Perhaps no nation in Italy could resist Rome’s power; but why did the Roman imperium end at the Danube instead of the Alps?  Nolan can’t answer this question, except to say that it wasn’t the battles.

Nolan gestures vaguely in the direction of the rise of the Islam and the decline of Constantinople, dismissing Tours as a squabble in a muddy forest trumped up by later historians, and completely ignoring the conquest and reconquest of Spain except to comment that neither happened in a year.  He points out that medieval warfare tended to be a rather squalid affair, of attempting to starve recalcitrant lord out of their castles before besieging vassals went home for the winter.  The English lost the Hundred Years’ War because they were a bunch of squabbling feudal warlords traipsing around northern France without any real strategic direction.   Fine.

The book then moves eagerly to the Thirty Years’ War and the rise of gunpowder warfare, and here the real meat of the book begins, on about page 80.  Nolan begins to mirror Robert Citino’s The German Way of War, cataloguing the competition between improved fortifications on the one hand and field armies and their armaments on the other.  But whereas Citino remained focused on Prussia and its successor states while still managing to involve the rest of Europe by implication or tangent, Nolan bounces his focus around Western Europe willy-nilly.  The Great Northern War, the Spanish Armada, and the Ottoman invasions of Europe all receive halfhearted treatment.  Nolan just doesn’t – indeed he can’t – include much supporting evidence for his conclusions about these conflicts.

Anyway, the Thirty Years’ War.  Well, the Thirty Years War was an incredibly destructive slog.  Many of the participants sought to change this and resolve the war quickly and favorably, but ultimately couldn’t, hence the “Thirty Years’” part.  Then Frederick II shows up – here, again, Nolan follows Citino, and now the digressions lessen.  Nolan thinks Frederick overrated – indeed he clearly thinks the concept of military genius overrated, possibly even nonexistent – and yet…and yet, somehow Prussia appears from among the congeries of the German principalities, and Frederick and his soldiers sure seem to have something to do with it.  As Nolan applies his thesis that battles don’t win wars to Frederick, he becomes increasingly pedantic.  Sure, Frederick carved off chunks of the much larger Holy Roman Empire to fuel his ambition of a consolidated and powerful Prussia but, you see, it was really hard and much went wrong, and much more could have gone wrong still except for luck.

Indeed Frederick pushed the limited resources of Prussia to the very limit, exhausting them in fact by the end of his reign.  Nolan thinks the cost was too high.  Well, it doesn’t matter: Frederick took the risks, paid the price, and got more or less what he wanted: Prussia as a power on the Continent.  Also, and this is a glaring point that Nolan ignores but Citino does not: Frederick’s wars were in fact faster and more decisive than the conflicts of the preceding 17^th century.

Nolan at this point becomes very enamored of Chancellor Hollweg’s striking metaphor of the “iron dice”.  I did enjoy Nolan’s emphasis on luck as a critical factor in war.  His argument makes the most sense as a corollary of the Law of Large Numbers: the more times those iron dice roll, the less the impact of the boxcars and snake eyes.  Except—and Nolan does point this out – these aren’t independent outcomes; the longer you fight, the more the enemy learns and marshals, the less initial advantages matter.  Still, he could have done better to focus on this aspect rather than continue to pile up anecdotes.

The next era is the French Revolution and its associated wars, culminating in Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo.  I can’t resist noting that Nolan never gripes about the cost of the French Revolution the way he did about Frederick’s wars.  Anyway, the levee en masse allows Napoleon’s armies to explode across the French frontier and conquer Europe before petering out in Moscow in 1812.  Competing powers harness mass conscription and eventually overwhelm Napoleon’s imperium.  Nolan narrates, accurately, how Napoleon eventually got himself into a position where he couldn’t win decisive battles, and it wouldn’t matter even if he could.  Napoleon indeed might be the clearest support for Nolan’s thesis: he repeatedly tried to solve his problems by forcing battle, and constantly overplayed his hand strategically, maniacally attempting to extend his conquest without any real overarching vision.

The Allure of Battle runs into trouble with the Wars of German Unification (Denmark 1864, Austria 1866, France 1870).  Nolan appears to dismiss the Second Schleswig War of 1864 as a trifle and doesn’t discuss it at all.  Which I found rather suspicious, since a decisive, single-campaign war fought successfully for definite ends sounds awfully like a refutation of Nolan’s thesis.  It’s not to Nolan’s credit that here and elsewhere he elides or dismisses such events.

Both the Austro-Prussian and the Franco-Prussian War were crushing victories for the Germans.  Both wars were carefully calculated risks on the part of both Bismarck and Moltke.  Both were fought for clear, limited ends, which the Germans achieved, and which could easily have gone badly through overextension.  Nolan fixates on minor failures and points of friction in the invading forces, such as the inadequacy of Prussian artillery against the Austrians vis a vis Prussian rifleman and the inadequacy of Prussian riflemen against the French vis a vis Prussian artillery four years later.  (Not only does Nolan write this, he even identified the fact that this was a deliberate tradeoff made by Prussian leaders, yet still tries to make both facts look like some sort of fumble on the part of the Prussians.)  Nolan also dances around pointing out that the French tried and failed to bait the invaders into moving deeper into France in 1870, preferring instead to describe how bad it would have been had the Germans gone for total conquest.  Well, they didn’t.

What Nolan probably ought to have done is to admit important differences between the aggressions of Bismarck and Napoleon, chalk up the differing outcomes to a combination of strategic planning and limited objectives, and detail how the legend of 1870 grew into fantasy and lured later generations of Germans into being too eager to throw those iron dice.  He does this, a bit.  Mostly though he nitpicks Prussian performance in a manner that reeks of armchair generalship and indulges in some moral grandstanding about the horrors of war.

The Germans try to repeat 1870 on a grander scale with the Schlieffen plan in WWI.  The French and the British stop the German advance at the Marne, and the war degenerates into the years-long corpse mill that students of modern history all know and love.  Note, however, that it now requires only four years to devastate the European continent, rather than decades as in the 17^th Century.  Even grinding attrition occurs much more quickly now; Nolan has nothing to say about this rather interesting fact.

Nolan does make a good point that he had foreshadowed in his discussions of the Unification Wars and repeats when he covers the Japanese: the drawbacks of the vaunted German Aufstragtaktik, or decentralized command.  The German supreme commander, Falkenhayn, adopts a strategy of attrition at Verdun but glory-hungry subordinate generals maneuver too aggressively in order to take ground but sustain casualties and materiel loss that the Germans can’t, ultimately, afford.  Nolan clearly favors more centralized control of large formations, an impression he implicitly reinforces when he ascribes the French defeat in 1940 to bad luck rather than cumbersome, overcentralized control.  I do agree with his criticism of excessive aggression by German commanders at Verdun, but such things are not a switch that can easily be switched on and off.  Suffice to say that sometimes decentralized and aggressive initiate is needed, other times not; wisdom lies in deciding when each is needed – and true skill in execution.

Allure doesn’t have anything new to say about World War 2.  After gobbling up most of continental Europe, the Germans crown their conquests with a stunning and total victory over France before launching a vaguely-planned and ludicrously-resourced invasion of the Soviet Union.  Nolan basically blames France’s defeat on bad luck, which I myself would say was necessary but not sufficient.  Unfortunately for Nolan, why the Germans lost WW2 is a much less interesting question than how they could possibly have won, or even survived.

After spending hundreds of pages discussing European military history, Nolan lurches across the planet to the Japanese Empire.  He does well portraying the combination of delusion and organizational anarchy prevailing in the Japanese government.  He tries, futilely, to connect Germany and Meiji Japan along the thin thread of the Japanese use of German military advisors, while summarizing the origin and history of Imperial Japan with astonishing vagueness and brevity.  In Nolan’s view, the Japanese failed to learn anything about modern warfare from fighting with either China or from Russia, although a better explanation is victor’s disease – the Japanese learned from fighting the Russians that they could achieve victory if they were willing to accept high casualties, but never really bothered to work out how far they could really go in expending their resources.  Another, unaddressed hypothesis is that the Japanese found European forces in Asian colonies to be paper tigers and falsely extrapolated that experience a larger conflict.

The Japanese attempt to neutralize the United States Navy in a single battle at Pearl Harbor and again at Midway, failing both times while making one poor strategic decision after another.   Nolan feels compelled to defend the Allies from charges of racism in fighting the Japanese before making an extremely ill-advised and inept attempt to explain why the German aggression was fundamentally worse than the Japanese.  No, this has nothing to do with his thesis.

Nolan’s analysis stops in 1945.  This made sense in The German Way of War, which Way plausibly ended with the collapse of the Third Reich, but tremendously undercuts the usefulness of The Allure of Battle as a prescriptive tool rather than an elaborate description of Why The Axis Lost, which would perhaps make a more honest subtitle.

In covering such a wide swath of history, Nolan does make his point that Victory in Battle can only take an inferior army so far.  Interestingly, he doesn’t address at all how prowess in battle can only take a materially superior army so far: Napoleon’s armies finally collapse only when confronted by superior quantity, despite severe qualitative degradation.  However none of Nolan’s examples account for the now-more-familiar guerrilla style of attrition (he pays only lip service to the Peninsular War).

Nolan needed to do more to address counterarguments.  The book’s Eurocentrism doesn’t help with this.  Perhaps the epitome of a short, decisive war in the horse-and-musket era is the Mexican-American War, in which the relatively small American army trounced an opponent of similar equipage but poor morale.  Yet Nolan gladly refers to the American Civil War to support his argument.

His failure to engage counterarguments bespeaks another problem.  Nolan doesn’t really have much to say about why “the allure of battle” is so destructive and so seductive across centuries and even millennia.  He compiles a lot of sources, but he doesn’t offer much analysis.  Is the allure dangerous because decisive battle is physically impossible (as perhaps in World War I), too risky, less cost-effective than attrition or positional warfare, or because it leads to strategic overreach for psychological or social/organizational reasons?  All of these are plausible, but they’re not all plausible in every circumstance.  Hitler’s opening offensives were extraordinarily risky, and initial success led to illusions of omnipotence.  The Duke of Marlborough’s methods simply weren’t cost-effective.  A quick decision may well have been an actual impossibility in 1914, or in 1630, or at Pearl Harbor.  Perhaps there’s some underlying thread tying all of these together; had Nolan identified such a fundament, he would have produced a very worthwhile theory.  Alas, the subjunctive.

Further, his decision to end his inquiry on V-J day makes the book nearly irrelevant except as a somewhat oblique popular history.  How the ghosts of Frederick and Moltke haunted the Kaiserreich is so much historical trivia.  How the Second World War or Desert Storm shape modern strategic thinking is not.  Is the United States still chasing the dragon of Normandy or 73 Easting as Napoleon did Jena, or Hitler Sedan?  Perhaps Nolan would simply be out of his depth on such questions; but if he’d put as much effort into chewing on them as he did compiling Machiavelli’s complaints about the condottiere warfare of contemporary Italy he might have found he’d cut his teeth sharp enough to spit out a worthwhile opinion.

Allure is fine if you don’t know much about military history, although I’d still categorically recommend The German Way of War over it.  Forget it, otherwise.