Book Reviews: War May Indeed Be Hell, But Try Being The Commander In Chief

Do you recall what Clemenceau said about war? He said war was too important to be left to the generals.

-- GENERAL JACK D. RIPPER IN DR. STRANGELOVE

The debate over the course of the war in Afghanistan, tensions between the White House and Pentagon over same, and General Stanley McChrystal's off-putting use of the word "resources" to describe the very real men and women under his command, has led me to read two different but related books.

They are The Face of Battle, the John Keegan classic that I first read shortly after it was published in 1976, and Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime, a 2002 study by Eliot A. Cohen.

The books are reviewed below, while there are related posts assessing President Obama as commander in chief and a random selection of outstanding books on war that I have read over the years.

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Keegan's working thesis is that most accounts of the famous battles of history don't really tell us what happened. He's right.

What is groundbreaking about The Faces of Battle, an early work from perhaps the preeminent military historian of our time, is that it focuses on the mechanics of battle and the experiences of ordinary soldiers. Keegan bursts a few myths along the way, including the effectiveness of the cavalry charge and notes that while the role of tanks in the Second World War could be decisive, the depictions of tank-to-tank battles in many a Hollywood film rarely took place. What did were battles between tanks and artillery.

Keegan lays out his thesis in focusing on three historically important battles -- Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme.

Agincourt, the centerpiece of Shakespeare's Henry V, was an improbable English victory over a much larger French army on October 25, 1415 in northern France. The battle was characterized by hand-to-hand combat and the king's extensive use of the longbow, and Keegan notes that French cavalry charges were blunted simply by digging pointed stakes into the ground. There were 7,000 to 10,000 casualties.

Waterloo was fought on June 18, 1815 in Belgium between the forces of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and an Anglo-Allied coalition led by the Duke of Wellington. This decisive defeat for Napoleon in what was to be his last battle before going into exile was characterized by the skillful use of advanced weaponry for the time, especially artillery. There were 54,000 casualties.

The Somme was fought from July to November 1816 between Germany and an Allied coalition with France and Britain in lead roles. It represented battle on a vast -- one could say inhuman -- scale, resulting in 1.5 million casualties, too many of them caused by the miscalculations of general staff officers who were painfully slow to adapt to the new realities of warfare. These included the use of poison gases and the inadequacy of the shallow defensive perimeter.

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Cohen focuses on another kind of battlefield in Supreme Command. That is the constant tension between political and military leaders during war.

Cohen, a military affairs expert, was perhaps the first person to advise President Bush to replace General George Casey with General David Petraeus as the top commander in Iraq. The rest, as they say, was history with Petraeus successfully planning and implementing the Surge strategy with minimal interference from a White House finally able to acknowledge, albeit privately, that it was losing the war, although the Iraqi government subsequently was to refuse to take advantage of the window of opportunity presented by the military gains.

While Keegan writes simply but with an elegant flair, Cohen's style is more that of an academic so Supreme Command is more likely to appeal to policy wonks.

His big sum-up is that wars are waged most effectively when civilian leaders heed the words of Clemenceau quoted above (although General Ripper certainly did not heed them in Dr. Strangelove, the Stanley Kubrick classic).

Cohen examines how four statesmen -- Abraham Lincoln, Clemenceau, Winston Churchill and David Ben-Gurion -- successfully exercised control over their generals (and admirals) during wars that threatened the very existence of their countries. The brilliance of Supreme Command is how Cohen explains the enormously complex challenges that each faced and how those challenges were met even if it meant, as it often did for these extraordinary leaders, in blurring the lines between politician and commander.

In Cohen's view, Lincoln's qualifications to serve as commander in chief were, on paper, infinitely inferior to those of his antagonist, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, but he was easily the greater war leader.

The author does not buy into the popular revisionist view that the problem of high command in the Civil War boiled down to merely finding enough good generals, something that Lincoln never was able to do. Lincoln, in fact, shared with Confederate General Robert E. Lee the art of making use of able but flawed subordinates who sometimes could not abide one another. He also had the ruthlessness needed to wage a total war, hence his famous injunction to General Ulysses E. Grant in the late summer of 1864 to "hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke as much as possible."

Clemenceau came to power late in life, becoming France's premier at age 76 at the nadir of the First World War. As one historian wrote, things were so awful that a bell chiming once a minute for each of the country's losses at the Battle of Verdun alone would ring for four months without pause.

The Tiger, as Clemenceau was called, set about shoring up the will of an army "bled white for three years," as Cohen puts it. He canceled orders to hang mutinous troops, spent one day a week at the front commiserating with infantrymen, sacked commanders who would not do his bidding, kept together the shaky coalition with Britain and the late-on-the-scene U.S. Finally, he presided over a peace treaty that, however flawed, restored to France the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, left Germany constrained but not crippled, and provided a barrier on the Rhine to blunt future German aggression that, of course, came all too soon.

As with Lincoln, revisionist historians have sought to diminish Churchill's stature. Cohen is not buying, nor am I, and we share the view that while few historical figures escape revisions of their worth, Churchill was a brilliant if occasionally erratic strategist, an extraordinary orator who never made light of Britain's dire straits, and arguably was the greatest of all wartime leaders.

Churchill understood that statesmanship during war presented a dizzying array of considerations and calculations not fully fathomable to even the most knowledgeable field officer. He mistrusted all foresight, including his own despite being egocentric, and demanded from his staff brutally honest assessments of what it would take in men and material to win the Second World War. His profound sense of the uncertainties inherent in war enabled him to produce with the help of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and to an extent Joseph Stalin, a blueprint for victory.

David Ben-Gurion was not merely leading the fight for Israel's survival, but for its very independence, and his story is perhaps the most inspiring of the four leaders because of how daunting that task was. While Lincoln had a shell of an Army at the outset of the Civil War, Ben-Gurion had to cobble one together practically from scratch and then through trial and error tuned it into a highly disciplined fighting machine.

Like Lincoln, Ben-Gurion was an autodidact. Unlike the American president, The Old Man, as he was called, was not a popular figure. Among the problems that he faced was a willfully provincial cadre in the existing militia, many of whom he dismissed in his quest to make the Israeli Defense Forces every bit as good as the British Army in which he had served with the Jewish Legion during the First World War. When the dream of a Jewish homeland came true in 1948 and with it an inevitable war with its Arab neighbors, Ben-Gurion served ably as both prime minister and defense minister, brilliantly executing a strategy that demanded not a single village be ceded. Despite being vastly outnumbered, the IDF fought Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syrian forces on three fronts to a stalemate that resulted in an armistice agreement, but of course not the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

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In an epilogue to The Face of Battle, Keegan writes of the future of war, including what its nature will be, what it will be fought with, how long it will be and where it will be. But it is his conclusion (written, mind you, in 1976) that is chillingly prescient:

"The young have already made their decision. They are increasingly unwilling to serve as conscripts in armies they see as ornamental. The militant young have taken that decision a stage further: they will fight for the causes which they process not through the mechanisms of the state and its armed power but, where necessary, against them, by clandestine and guerrilla methods. It remains for armies to admit that the battles of the future will be fought in never-never land. While the great armoured hosts face each other across the boundary between east and west, no soldier on either side will concede that he does not believe in the function for which he plans and trains. As long as states put weapons in their hands, they will show each other the iron face of war. But the suspicion grows that battle has already abolished itself."

IMAGES (Top to bottom): Vietnam War infantryman by The Associated Press; Battle of Agincourt; Wellington at Waterloo; Battle of The Somme; General Petraeus; Abraham Lincoln; Georges Clemenceau; Winston Churchill; David Ben-Gurion; The technological war of the future.