War stories
Max Hastings
War Since 1945 Michael Carver (Weidenfeld £8.50)
Could there be some sort of Parkinson's Law about the quality of books being in inverse relationship to the celebrity of their authors? When a famous •mail of action turns to churning out his writings. publishers seem to suspend their critical faculties, and cheerfully push into the bookshops anything that their contractor can be persuaded to cobble together between hard covers.
Field Marshal Lord • Carver was a highly articulate Chief of Defence Staff who is much in the news these days for his reservations about the value of nuclear weapons. War Since 1945 is an ambitious title for his latest book: one expects careful analysis of the changing relationship between armour and infantry, the role of missiles on the bait lefield, the debate about the difficulty of operating tactical aircraft in a hostile air defence environment and so on. What we have actually got, in newspaper parlance, is a cuttings job. Lord Carver has sat down with the contemporary history books and compiled a flat, factual account of who went where when on some of the world's battlefields since 1945. Unless one proposes seriously to examine the development of arms and tactics, it is hard to see the point of the exercise. What have British operations in Palestine in the 1940s to do with the Yom Kippur War, or Korea in 1951 with Borneo in 1965?
The only comparisons that seize one's attention are those of scale: how in our insularity we speak of the Cyprus Emergency — which involved 20,000 British troops and the deaths of less than 300 people — in the same breath as Algeria, where 17,456 French troops, an estimated 141,000 FLN and 300,000 civilians died. How little we valued black life 30 years ago: we accounted the Kenya Emergency small beer because it cost only 63 European lives, but 10,257 Mau Mau were estimated killed and 1,827 Afri can civilians. In Borneo 17,000 British troops were deployed in the Emergency and killed some 600 Indonesians at a cost of 114 British and Gurkha lives. The French lost 7184 at Dien Bien Phu alone. Their colonial wars made ours seem pleasantly paltry.
What else can one usefully say about the colonial wars as military operations? That retreating imperialists cannot offer their forces a clear aim to achieve victory, says Lord Carver; that Intelligence is critical; that the campaigns were mostly fought in places that armies found disagreeable. Beta Minus for the first term at Sandhurst, so far. On Vietnam, Korea, the Middle East the book adequately describes events on the battlefield in the style the Sunday Times Insight team achieve a fortnight after the event. There is no penetrating analysis of command, no assessment of personalities, no evidence of inside knowledge.
Presumably the justification for this unexacting canter over the course is that the book is designed for a lay rather than a specialist audience. But if that is so, then Lord Carver's abilities are simply being squandered. Students of war deserve better both from the Field-Marshal and from Ills publishers.
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