Of Military History, and the History of War

The term "military history" conventionally denotes that branch of history concerning war in all of its aspects--including its political, economic, social, cultural aspects. Yet I get the impression that for most it refers less to the history of war broadly than to the history of what militaries do in war, and particularly the study of battles and campaigns, such that the field is dominated by operational history, and by memoirs and biographies by and of soldiers and especially commanders. Indeed, considering how large this obviously essential but nevertheless far-from-the-entirety part of what war means in the human experience looms in the field it seems to me that there is a justification for distinguishing between military history and the history of war in a broader fashion.

This is all the more the case in as there seem significant intellectual differences between those who study military history, and those who study the history of war more broadly, not least in political outlook. Persons who see the martial life as an honorable, edifying and virtuous one, soldiering as an heroic adventure, the battlefield as a scene of personal and patriotic glory, and history as something made by Great Men with the Great Captains the greatest of them all, are much more likely than those who are anti-militaristic in outlook to take a deep interest in battles, campaign and commanders, in operational details and the recollections of the participants in them and the later reconstruction of battlefield events than those who do not, with the result that the field of military history as discussed here skews very right-wing indeed.

By contrast people might quite easily study the history of war more broadly from any political perspective, and indeed find themselves prompted to study that history not in spite of but because of their opposition to war. Indeed, those who take an anti-militaristic view of war as a great evil, because of their critical perspective, are often particularly active, and productive, in analyzing such matters as the government decision-making that leads to wars, the culture of militarism, the propaganda of conflict, the harsh realities of wartime economic life from privation to profiteering and of life in military institutions, the atrocities that invariably follow the violence, and what it all does to soldier and civilian, society and humanity, during and long, long after the conflict. The result is that while I would not say that the study of war more broadly is a left-wing field it is the case that one often sees intellectuals of the left like a Gabriel Kolko or an Adam Hochschild not only take an interest in the history of war but write what come to be the essential, the standard, works in their areas of interest regarding it.

In and of itself worthy of mention, this distinction is the more consequential because of the gaps in the historiography, with that seemingly most-studied conflict of all time, World War II, an obvious case. In English-language coverage of such important subject areas as the fighting on the Eastern front that actually comprised the great bulk of the European war one can see the nationalistic, racial and Anti-Communist prejudices of the writers not just on display, but profoundly distorting comprehension of the subject, the more thoroughly in that those not sharing those prejudices so rarely take up that side of the subject matter. Meanwhile few even notice the failing because the attitudes discussed above are so much the prevailing ones, especially at the popular level--and challenge to the conventional wisdom likely to be a by-academics-for-academics production that may change some experts' minds, but likely not the minds of the particular experts writing for that more general audience, and generally giving them the Established-approved version of things. Thus is the layperson likely to be exposed to that version a thousand times for every time that a dissenting intellectual can get a word in on the matter. Thus for a generation Tom Brokaw, "Stephen Ambrose" and Bill O'Reilly have been, where what is presented before that general public is concerned, the favored chroniclers and interpreters of the Second World War to the American people--in the view of many, very unfortunately.