Of Aphorisms, Lessons, and Paradigms: Comparing the British and German Official Histories of the Russo-Japanese War Author(s):

Gary P. Cox Source: The Journal of Military History, Vol. 56, No. 3 (Jul., 1992), pp. 389-402 Published by: Society for Military History Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1985969 Accessed: 05/10/2009 16:18
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Of Aphorisms, Lessons, and Paradigms: Comparing the Britishand German Official Histories of the Russo-Japanese War

Gary P. Cox

OW seems a particularlyapt moment to reexamine the problem of how militaries learn from history, and what, if anything, history has to teach them.1 The 1991 war in the Persian Gulf triggered a brief renaissance of historicalmindedness in this country. Soldiers,journalists, even politicianswere quick to examine MiddleEasthistory,and America's own military past, to prescribe a method for dealing with the conflict. From Saladin to Ho Chi Minh, history has been strip-mined to guide our course. It is a great relief to know that Clio, so often neglected, is now being assiduously courted on all sides. Not so surprising, therefore, was the American Historical Association Convention in December 1991 in New York City where "lessons" from military history-specifically the
N

1. This essay greatly benefitted from the advice, encouragement, and criticism of friends and colleagues throughout the academic community. Dr. Robert Pape (then) in Ann Arbor took time to read the draft and to compare with me the methodologies of political science and history. Dr. Jim Corum (then) at Queen's College, Kingston, Ontario, was kind enough to share with me the results of his own research in the German Army Archives, and to check certain German texts for me. Special thanks must go to Mr. Steve Chun of the Air University Library; Steve and his colleagues ran down many leads in our collection and through Inter-Library Loan. Here at the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Dr. David Mets, Dr. Harold Winton, Lt. Col. Ken Feldman, and Major Mark Clodfelter all took time from their own crowded schedules to comment on this paper in its various stages. Although they saved me from innumerable blunders, they could not be expected to catch everything. Whatever mistakes remain are my own. The views expressed do not necessarily represent those of the Department of Defense, the Air Force, or the Air University.
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the most pressing concern for many "lessons of Vietnam"-seemed attendees. While it is fashionable to decry this search for lessons, their allure, especially in military history, remains strong.2 The process is centuries old. Its roots in the West go back at least to Machiavelli and his desire to "rationalize" warfare.3 The entire Jominian approach to war can be analyzed and reduced to a comparison between a given operation and its adherence to certain principles.4 Nineteenthcentury positivism provided both a method for obtaining "positive knowledge" and asserted that method's utility in ordering human affairs. The Great War of 1914-18 was, however, the most powerful twentiethcentury impetus toward the search for lessons from military history.5 World War I, or more precisely the Fuller-Lloyd George-Liddell Hart interpretation of World War I, has become a paradigm against which almost a century of military history, from 1861 to 1945, is studied and

2. It seems to me that there are three identifiable responses to the idea of seeking "lessons" from history. Position one, that of the "pure historian," sees the study of history as its own justification and reward; one should not expect or demand lessons from the past, which should be studied, appreciated, and enjoyed for its own sake. Since the military defines itself as a socially useful organization, it is safe to say that virtually none of the military's historians, nor those personnel whose jobs focus on identifying and learning the lessons of modern combat-such organizations as the Army's National Training Center or the Air Force's "Red Flag" come to mind-would subscribe to this "pure history" position. At the other extreme are those who see in history a vehicle to induce enduring principles. In my own experience (nineteen years as an Air Force officer) I can attest that most senior officers I have encountered who showed any interest in history at all see it as the raw ore that when refined, produces a body of truths which can help produce victory in battle. As one senior leader told me: "Now (referring to the opening of our new school at Maxwell Air Force Base) we can teach the 'right' lessons." I believe that most historians now serving in or with the military fit somewhere between these polar positions. Most have been trained in civilian graduate programs; many are uneasy about if not opposed to the notion of extracting lessons from the past. hlowever they do subscribe-and I include myself in this group-to the idea that history can supply experience and enhance critical judgment. This article was the product of my own unease with my service's penchant for seeking lessons from the past, a tendency only heightened by our spectacular military performance in the Gulf War. In the past five months there have been innumerable "lessons from Desert Storm" briefings here at Air University. While such inquests are necessary, there are problems with the military's traditional approach to this kind of material, which I hope this article illustrates. 3. The best summary of Machiavelli's contribution to modern warfare remains Felix Gilbert's "Machiavelli: The Renaissance of the Art of War,"in Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 11-31. 4. For Jomini, see John Shy, "Jomini," ibid., 143-85. 5. See John Alger, The Questfor Victory: The History of the Principles of War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), 121-45.
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Of Aphorisms, Lessons, and Paradigms interpreted.6 In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn has defined a scholarly paradigm as an example that provides a model and gives focus and direction to subsequent work.7 The World War I paradigm is built upon a particularly British view of the Great War, that of an essentially pointless struggle controlled by prototypical "Colonel Blimps" who, in failing to take into account over fifty years of military history, condemned the "flower" of British youth to the hecatombs of the Somme and Passchendaele.8 These themes are central to much of the work of Fuller and Liddell Hart, and they in turn have certainly provided "focus and direction" to subsequent scholarship.9 John Terraine has argued persuasively that this viewpoint is a distortion of the war's grim reality: that Britain's experiences, horrifying though they were, were hardly unique; and that the British share of the price of victory was commensurate with the war's unlimited political aims.10 So powerful and popular is the Fuller-Liddell Hart viewpoint, however, and so eloquent the voices, that virtually all military history dealing with the fifty years on either side of 1914 is written in comparison to this paradigm of the Great War. The persistent portrayal of World War II as a "good war," a smarter, cleaner, nobler, less costly cataclysm than its predecessor derives in part from the moral quality of our opponents to be sure. It also reflects the feeling that by the Battle of Britain, the West had finally "gotten it right" and learned to fight with
6. For Fuller and Liddell Hart, appropriate references are legion; representative are J. F. C. Fuller, The Conduct of War, 1789-1961 (n.p.: Minerva Press, 1968), 131-82; B.H. Liddell Hart, A History of the World War, 1 914-1 918 (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1970). 7. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 10-11. 8. For an expansion and refutation of this notion of a "lost generation," see Robert J. Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979). 9. Books in this "school" are legion. Among the most interesting are Alan Clark, The Donkeys (London: Hutchinson, 1961); and Leon Wolff, In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign (New York: Viking Press, 1958); virtually all the works of Fuller and Liddell Hart could be mentioned here, along with Churchill's World Crisis. Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975) is written from a similar perspective. 10. Perhaps the best and quickest introduction to the major themes of this historian's seminal work is his, "1916: The Year of the Somme," Army Quarterly and Defence Journal 116 (July 1986): 441-60. This essentially British debate over the nature of World War I has ignored the consequences of the "Fischer thesis": was the Great War an utterly futile exercise if Germany's goals included continental military and economic hegemony? Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1967) states Fischer's case; his reply to his critics is in Fritz Fischer, World Power or Decline: The Controversy over Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York:W. W. Norton, 1965).
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machines instead of people." When Mark Clodfelter writes of an "aerial Verdun" in the skies over North Vietnam, the metaphor still evokes powerful images.12 In this paradigmatic construction of military history, the fifty years and five wars-American Civil, Franco-Prussian, RussoTurkish, Boer, and Russo-Japanese-before 1914 are consistently depicted as clearly predicting World War I.13Here, proponents of this paradigm argue, were clear warnings of what was to come. Only the obtuseness of the collective Western "military mind" prevented the understanding and acceptance of this message.14 In this litany of lessons unlearned, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 holds a unique place. Most military historians have turned the "war of the Rising Sun and the Tumbling Bear" into a litmus test of military institutions' abilities to learn from history. This test, it is usually alleged, was flunked.'5 Confronted with barbed wire, shrapnel, trenches, and machine guns, all used frequently and in relative abundance during the 1904-5 war, the armies of Europe ignored or refused to see the clear "lessons of history," and persisted in tactics and doctrines that nearly destroyed an entire generation. The "new military historians" have made an important contribution toward dispelling much of the certitude that seemingly enfolds this paradigm.16 Michael Howard's "Men Against Fire" is perhaps the best,
11. The best refutation for this subtly pervasive myth is D. J. Goodspeed's controversial but always interesting The German Wars, 1914-1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977). The argument is also sustained in John Ellis's new book, Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (New York: Viking, 1990). 12. Mark Clodfelter, The Limits of Airpower: The American Bombing of North Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1989), 210. 13. See, for example: William McElwee, The Art of War: Waterloo to Mons (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974), 298-327; Robert C. Ehrhart, ed., Modern Warfare and Society (Maxwell AFB: Air Command and Staff College, n.d.), 9-10, 14-15; Theodore Ropp, War in the Modern World (New York:Collier Books, 1971), 195-235; LarryAddington, The Patterns of War Since the Eighteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 91-121; for a more balanced treatment see Brian Bond, War and Society in Europe, 1870-1970 (New York:St. Martin's Press, 1983), 13-99. 14. The "classic" treatment of the "military mind" remains Norman F. Dixon, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (London: Futura Books, 1979). 15. Fuller, Conduct of War, 142; Richard A. Preston and Sydney F. Wise, Men in Arms: A History of Warfare and Its Interrelationships with Western Society, 4th ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), 259; Ehrhart, Modern Warfare, 12-17; R. M. Connaughton, The War of the Rising Sun and the Tumbling Bear: A History of the Russo-Japanese War, 1 904-1 905 (London: Routledge, 1988). 16. A short list would include: Tim Travers, The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front, and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900-1918 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1987); Douglas Porch, The March to the Marne
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Of Aphorisms, Lessons, and Paradigms most persuasive piece dealing specifically with the war in Manchuria.'7 Howard shows how observers of this war saw in its conduct and outcome a vindication of the European emphasis on morale and the principle of the offensive.18 In battle after battle, even when their opponents resolved to attack, even though usually outnumbered and occasionally outgunned, the Japanese seized the initiative, took the offensive, usually absorbed heavier casualties, and won victory after victory. Of all the lessons available from this war, this one was perhaps the clearest. And it was certainly noted by most observers in the accounts they published after
the war. 19

This lesson from Manchuria did not play out well a decade later. There are in fact few instances where the military past has been successfully used to predict the future.20 Still, the seekers after lessons in military history are ubiquitous and persistent. Friends in the Pentagon have been busy extracting the lessons of the Gulf War, an endeavor in which defense analysts and the media have enthusiastically joined. Scholars continue to synthesize battles and campaigns to develop their own models explaining victory and defeat.21 Thus, a further cautionary tale about the problems associated with learning lessons from military history seems in order. The official histories of the Russo-Japanese War illustrate the epistemological problem. At least four major studies were produced: by Austria, Great Britain, Germany, and Russia.22 In addition, the United

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham, Fire-power: British Army Weapons and Theories of War, 1904-1945 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1982). 17. Michael Howard, "Men Against Fire: The Doctrine of the Offensive in 1914," in Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy, 510-26. 18. Ibid., 519-21. 19. There were eighty-three observers from fifteen countries in Manchuria; Charles T. Payne, "The Russo-Japanese War [sic] Impact on Western Military Thought Prior to 1914" (Master's Thesis, University of Georgia, 1990), 13. 20. Michael Howard, "Military Science in an Age of Peace," Journal of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies 119 (March 1974): 5. 21. See, for example, Colonel T. N. Dupuy, Understanding Defeat: How to Recoverfrom Loss of Battle to Gain Victory in War (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 51-92. 22. There are two official histories used in this paper: Great Britain, Committee of Imperial Defence, Historical Section, Official History (Naval and Military) of the Russo-Japanese War, 3 vols. (London: Harrison and Sons, 1910-1920); henceforth in notes, BOH. Prussia. Great General Staff. Historical Section. The RussoJapanese War, 7 vols., trans. Karl von Donat (London: Hugh Rees, 1908-1914); henceforth in notes GOH. Professor James Corum has kindly compared this English edition with Grossen Generalstabe, Kriegsgeschichtliche Abteilung I, Kriegsgeschichtliche Einzelschriften aus dem russich-japonischen Kriege 1904 bis 1905 (Berlin:
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States printed the accounts of her military observers, accredited to headquarters on both sides.23 The difficulties associated with this kind of history are well known.24 As Leonard Krieger noted more than two decades ago, official military history is suspect on three counts: it is contemporary, official, and collaborative.25 The modern reader, with his almost implicit distrust of bureaucracies, brings to such volumes a healthy skepticism that seeks to cull truth from "message." The subjects of this paper, the British and German official histories, are clearly contemporary, official, and collaborative; they are also interpretative and, at least in the German case, relentlessly didactic. Read today they often suggest fascinating or fantastic insights, particularly when aided conspiracy theorist, psychoby hindsight. Is it only a coincidence-a historian, or journalist might ask-that the German account of the Battle of the Scha-Ho charges Russian subordinate commanders, among them Rennenkampf and Samsonov, with "excessive anxiety for their flanks," a neurosis both had apparently overcome at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes a decade later?26 There are, however, important reasons why these histories still merit reading. Above all, they tell us much about the concerns and viewpoints of the institutions that wrote them, and perhaps more importantly, about the interests and perspectives of those for whom these accounts were written. To read the Great General Staff's officially sanctioned account of the war is to gain considerable insight into the Weltanschauung of that famous body. A good case can be made that the militaries of the time, viewing history prescriptively, embarked on the Great War attempting to put into practice what they had learned in this previous conflict. In order to implement these lessons, the militaries fervently believed that their first, crucial step was to discover what actually happened. This demand for "scientific history" produced the detailed, "objective" accounts that provided the official picture of the war, complete with lessons. Since it is often asserted that the Germans
E. S. Mittler und Sohn, 1906-13), Hefte 37-49. Professor Corum agrees with my assessment that the English edition is a solid and authentic translation of the German, which I was unable to obtain in time to complete this essay. 23. United States War Department. General Staff, Office of the Chief of Staff (Military Information) Division, Reports of Military Observers Attached to the Armies in Manchuria, 5 parts (Washington: GPO, 1906-7). 24. Ronald H. Spector, "An Improbable Success Story: Official Military Histories in the Twentieth Century," Public Historian 12 (Winter 1990): 25-30; Martin Blumenson, "Can Official History Be Honest History?" Military Affairs 26 (Winter 1962-63): 153-61; B. H. Liddell Hart, Why Don't We Learn From History? (New York:Hawthorne Books, 1971), 27, 31. 25. Spector, "Improbable Success Story," 25. 26 GOH 5:380.
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Of Aphorisms, Lessons, and Paradigms learned most from the war in Manchuria, and since it might be inferred that the British seemingly learned least, comparing their official histories, based upon Michael Howard's four dimensions of twentieth-century warfare-the operational, the logistical, the social, and the technologicalcan illustrate the problems involved in learning lessons from the past, even "as it actually was."27 The Historical Section of the Great General Staff produced a thirteenvolume official history, complete with excellent operational maps. The focus of these volumes was on the operational art. 28 The German Army's style of writing military history had already been characterized by an anonymous British reviewer, as a "picture of war on a gigantic scale slowly unrolled before the reader, with all the complex purpose and involved action calmly traced by a master hand. Effect is evolved from cause with the merciless logic of a mathematical problem."29 Julian Corbett wrote contemptuously of this "German" method.30 This
27. The words, of course, are Ranke's-or at least the traditional English translation of his wie es eigentlich gewesen; see John Barker, The Superhistorians: Makers of Our Past (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1982), 151-52. For examples of Germany's "learning curve" from Manchuria, see McElwee, Art of War, 304; McElwee insists that the massacre of the Prussian Guard at Gravelotte was most responsible for persuading the Germans to enter the Great War with more machine guns than their foes. John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), 61, says that Prince Wilhelm's interest in gadgetry, plus the war in Manchuria, persuaded the Germans to buy more of these weapons. J. M. Winter, The Experience of World War I (New York:Oxford University Press, 1989), 138, claims that one of the lessons learned especially well by the Germans was the importance of firepower on the modern battlefield. Payne, "The Russo-Japanese War Impact," says the Germans learned the lessons best-but uses as evidence the fact that after the initial crush, the Germans chose to stand on the defensive, a clear case of seeing in the Western Front the totality of the war, and of mistaking strategy for technological foresight. Fuller asserts that while both sides missed the main point, the new firepower of the defensive, "the Germans . . . learned most from the Manchurian struggle": J. F. C. Fuller, A Military History of the Western World (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1956), 3: 187-88. Perhaps the most detailed discussion of who learned what in Manchuria is in Jack K. Snyder, The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). 28. Colonel Michael D. Krause, "Moltke and the Origins of Operational Art," Military Review 70 (September 1990): 28-44. Note in GOH, 7: 118-19, 152, the emphasis on the distinction between simple "envelopment" and the "turning movement"; cf. Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1983), 705-10. 29. "Military History of the Campaign of 1882 in Egypt," Edinburgh Review 167 (1888): 286; quoted in Jay Luvaas, "The First British Official Historians," Military Affairs 26 (Summer 1962): 51. 30. Donald M. Schurman, Julian S. Corbett, 1854-1922: Historian of British Maritime Policyfrom Drake to Jellicoe (London: Royal Historical Society, 1981),
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"Olympian" perspective was not always perceived in such negative terms, even before the modern notion that the Great General Staff possessed a "genius for war."'31Spenser Wilkinson in his 1890 study of the German General Staff, The Brain of an Army, stressed the staffs belief that military history was nothing less than the most effective means of teaching war during peacetime.32 This teaching method Wilkinson termed "objective or positive criticism." It was based on developing an objective account of what happened, moved to a deduction of the causes of the studied events, and concluded with an attempt to sketch the most appropriate response for each situation.33 This "true method" of teaching was seen as the principal means of maturing military judgment.34 Of course, the method was Clausewitz's, and it is perhaps indicative of how little known he was that Wilkinson writes of his methodology as if it were startlingly new.35 Perhaps most significantly, Wilkinson noted the purpose behind this entire effort: to learn the "unchanging conditions upon which good generalship depends, in their connection with changing tactical forms."36 Wilkinson's point is fundamental to understanding the German work. Its overt link to the past was critical: the most important task was the mastery of those timeless and "unchanging conditions" that had challenged Alexander and Napoleon, as well as Kuropatkin and Oyama. One such immutable principle, already noted, was the importance of the offensive in attaining victory. Two of its most important corollaries were the morale of the troops and the resolution of the commander. The German official history is replete with judgments condemning the virtual passivity of Russian commanders, especially in comparison to their aggressive and energetic foe. A few sample observations illustrate the unique, almost aphoristic flavor of much of the work, and its emphasis on mastering "unchanging conditions." Japanese operations were, from a German perspective, "but another proof of the initiative being always sure to conquer a difficult situation."37 The course of events "shows that he who wishes to make quite sure of everything in war, and never ventures, will always be at a disadvantage,

31. Colonel T. N. Dupuy, A Genius for War: The German Army and General Staff, 1807-1 945 (Fairfax, Va.: Hero Books, 1984). 32. Spenser Wilkinson, The Brain of an Army: A Popular Account of the German General Staff (London: Macmillan Co., 1890), 95. 33. Ibid., 98. 34. Ibid., 98-99. 35. Ibid., 99. See Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 156-69. 36. Wilkinson, Brain of an Army, 99. 37. GOH, 2:250.
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Of Aphorisms, Lessons, and Paradigms and that boldness is the acme of wisdom."38 "The contrast in the actions of both these commanders clearly shows the moral superiority of the Japanese conduct of operations over that of the Russians. The will to conquer, conquered."39 The resolve of the Japanese commander "paralyzed" an intended Russian counterattack.40 The Russian commander, Kuropatkin, was reminded with a quotation from Napoleon that "nothing protects the line of communications better than a victorious battle."'41 Early Russian defeat, despite numerical superiority and modern defensive works, prompted a "terrible loss of morale which ultimately cost . .. the campaign."42 Yet the reason for defeat was not the loss of a battle: the Russians "had retired only because their supreme commander had not the strength of mind to fight the battle to the bitter end."43 As far as the Great General Staff was concerned, "the Russian conduct of operations was doomed, during the whole war, never to find the right way out of this partially self-imposed defensive attitude."44 France's Colonel Fran4ois Loyzeau de Grandmaison or General Ferdinand Foch would scarcely have said this any differently-or more aphoristically. The text's relentless emphasis on boldness in offensive operations certainly suggests the influence of Alfred von Schlieffen. Despite contemporary criticisms of "one-sidedness" (the reference here is to his insistence on the battle of annihilation, not to his even more famous right wing) and defective method in his writing of military history, Schlieffen was widely admired among junior general staff officers. His continuing influence (he retired in 1906) on the German account would help explain its virtual indifference to all aspects of war save operational art and its supports: utilization of terrain; the disposition and deployment of forces; adherence to alleged Clausewitzian leadership and training.45 This narrow, almost obsessive focus on the operational level of war produced only a brief discussion of tactics, illustrating Bruce Gudmundsson's contention of their relegation in the pre-1914 German Army to a

38. Ibid., 254. 39. GOH, 3:220. 40. Ibid., 123. 41. Ibid., 212. 42. Ibid., 221. 43. GOH,4:2. 44. GOH, 1:258. 45. Jehuda L. Wallach, The Dogma of the Battle of Annihilation: The Theories of Clausewitz and Schlieffen and Their Impact on the German Conduct of the Two World Wars (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1986), 36-37. For a critique of Schlieffen's historical method, see Arden Bucholz, Hans Delbruck and the German Miltary Establishment (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1985), 70-72.
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"subsidiary art."46 The Russians did receive special criticism for their reliance on "obsolete shock tactics without sufficient use of skirmishers and without sufficient preparation by fire."47 Lamentably, "decision in battle was not sought in fire action, but in a bayonet charge of dense masses."48 Offensive operations remained the key to victory; however, their success relied on efficient employment of combined arms. At the operational level, the British official history, if not quite so dogmatic or insistently didactic, reached the same conclusions as the German study. Like the Germans, the British were quick to censure either side when offensive ardor outweighed the "science and method" of modern combat.49 This science and method was best illustrated at the Battle of the Scha-Ho, where "a wide expanse of open country, apparently offering an almost ideal field of fire to the defence, was crossed in two or three long rushes by the [Japanese] attackers, who hardly paused to shoot, trusting principally to their own artillery to keep down the fire of the enemy."50 Speed was not the main factor in this attack's success; rather it was an absolute determination to win on the part of the infantry and efficient artillery preparation. Where these are to be found questions of interval and distance, although very far from being negligible, are of less importance, and it does not appear that the relative value of these different factors will be greatly affected even against an enemy more skilled in the use of the rifle than the Russiansproved to be.51 As for Russian tactics, the British assessment mirrored the German: Russian infantry attacks lacked "coherence, driving power, or suitable formations, and are instructionally of purely negative value."52 But the British history is far more than a mere repetition of the German. The Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence employed such talented officers as E. D. Swinton and young Captain Archibald Wavell to produce, in Jay Luvaas's assessment, a work "of exceptionally high quality," which as a record of what actually occurred, "is probably the best account of the war produced by any general staff in Europe."53 In the areas beyond operational art-especially in technology-this
46. Bruce I. Gudmundsson, Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914-1918 (New York: Praeger, 1989), 13. 47. GOH, 1:258. 48. Ibid. 49. BOH, 2:509. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 508. 53. Luvaas, "First British Official Historians," 53-54; see especially n. 28.
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Of Aphorisms, Lessons, and Paradigms excellence emerges most clearly. Neither work is strong on the societal aspects of the war, though both do contrast the almost fanatical loyalty of the Japanese infantryman with the stolid fatalism of his opponent.54 Both works discuss logistics, but from profoundly differing perspectives. The Germans pay full tribute to the immense Russian effort to move and supply an army from the Trans-Siberian railroad.55 The British saw the entire area of logistics as a point of weakness that hindered Russian operations throughout the war. Not surprisingly, the British tied this discussion to an insistence on the importance of seapower to the land campaign.56 The treatment of technology most clearly differentiates the two histories. Both discuss the use of new weapons, but in distinctly matterof-fact terms, without any indication of surprise at new methods or their results.57 The British account, however, mentions such technology more frequently, and even speculates on the impact that then-emerging technologies might have had on the war. Since the end of the conflict, the British history notes, "the art of aviation has developed. By it has been created a fifth arm possessed of such immense potentialities that some reference to the possible consequences of its employment . . . seemsjustified." 58The text discusses how reconnaissance aviation might drastically curtail or render ineffective the great turning movements that emerged as almost a motif in Japanese operational art.59 Only in The Technical and Tactical Lessons of the World War, produced as the title signifies after World War I, did the Germans begin to address technology as a key, separate issue. The report noted the General Staff's failure to recognize war's new material demands, and concluded boldly that "this was the basic mistake of the war."60 This issue of technology neatly frames an interesting juxtaposition
54. BOH, 2: 210. Or note this: "The absence of decisive results achieved in the land operations of the war, indeed, can to a great extent be attributed to the fact that an army which was at its worst in pursuit was fighting an army which was at its best in rearguard actions." BOH, 3:717. 55. An interesting limiting factor on Japanese operations was the alleged fear that adverse results in the field would cause a downturn in the international money markets, and Japan was heavily committed to borrowing to finance the war; GOH, 2:255. 56. BOH, 1:407. 57. BOH, volume two alone has twelve references to machine guns; twelve for telephones; eight on torpedo attacks; the index also lists mines, submarines, and the telegraph; BOH, 2: 828ff. One German reference to machine guns discusses their use supporting cavalry; GOH, 4:282. 58. BOH, 2:205. 59. Ibid. 60. Colonel Karl Thorbeck, The Technical and Tactical Lessons of the World War, Reports of the German Army Inspectorates, Bundesarchiv/Militaerarchiv, RH
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of "lessons learned" with the decipherers of those lessons. If the Germans learned better than the other powers the right lessons of the RussoJapanese War, they gleaned them from sources other than their own official history, which focused on operational art and stressed offensive tactics and strategy built upon the moral resolution of the commander. The "donkeys" who led the British nevertheless had at their disposal more probing insights into a crucial element of modern war, technology. Perhaps each side only read the other's history. Some might maintain neither side really studied the war at all. Perhaps the real issue should be framed not in terms of "lessons," but as Michael Howard has insisted and Tim Travers has illustrated, in terms of adaptation to a combat environment that was new and terrifying.61 Clearly in 1914 the decision to adopt offensive strategies was based on many more factors than simply the experiences of the Russo-Japanese War.62 But both sides embarked on the Great War reassured by these lessons. Unfortunately, the lessons of Manchuria were descriptive, but not predictive. They illustrated that the fundamental problem of postulating lessons from history lies in the very nature of history itself. Good history often makes for poor soothsaying. A second major problem with the derivation of lessons is centered in the nineteenth-century certainty of being able to discover the truth of the past. But as Peter Novick has pointed out, discovering the past "as it actually was" proved an exceedingly difficult and slippery undertaking.63 Even for Ranke, the putative doyen of this school, the real goal was to uncover the past "as it essentially was," and even this task required combining a "scientific" search for original sources with the almost metaphysical insight that the historian could intuit from immersion in those sources.64 What primary sources could not remove, of own personality and course, was the historian's unique identity-his point of view. Institutional histories possess similar attributes. Both the German and the British histories revealed clearly and easily defined viewpoints: the German from almost a generation's intense study of the operational art; the British, thanks to Mahan, with a newfound articulation

12-2/94, April 12, 1920; quoted in James S. Corum, "The Reichswehr and the Concept of Mobile War in the Era of Hans von Seeckt" (Ph.D. Diss., Queen's College, 1990), 50. 61. See Howard's essay, "MilitaryScience in an Age of Peace," 3-11. 62. Scott D. Sagan, "1914 Revisited: Allies, Offense, and Instability," International Security 11 (Fall 1986): 151-75. 63. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 21-46. 64. Ibid., 27-28.
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Of Aphorisms, Lessons, and Paradigms of the crucial nature of seapower and a centuries-long appreciation for war's logistical problems. Both found ample evidence to support their interpretations. Both saw the war as it "essentially was"-from their own point of view. It is tempting to state flatly that the real "lesson" of this episode is to abandon, once and for all, the search for lessons from military history. Yet despite the problems associated with this quest, the hunt for the if the products of this research lessons of modern war goes on-even are often disappointingly superficial.65 There is little likelihood that this didactic approach to military history will ever be completely abandoned, not least because most historians share a "gut feel" for the utility of historical study. Perhaps the soldier or scholar should bring a bit of historicism to his study of the past, reminding himself not necessarily that "every age is immediate unto God," but that every conflict is unique, fought in a particular time and place by people and in circumstances that cannot be duplicated, and chronicled by individuals or groups that are themselves unique in perspective. The student, as Jonathan Shimshoni asserts, "should use their record warily, to suggest problems, opportunities, potential avenues to solutions, and routes to arrow toward consistently rejuvenated theories of advantage-an
victory." 66

Shimshoni's advice is especially appropriate for the soldier, reminding him (and us) that military history is a record of the past, to be used as a fund of the experiential and the interrogatory. Thus three important cautions ought to be added to Michael Howard's oft-repeated counsels to read military history in breadth, depth, and context. We must read with a keen awareness of the individual biases and institutional "blinders" with which all history is produced; we must always realize the tentative nature of our conclusions; and we must remember that the past is gone forever, and that in trying to capture the essence of that past, we always run the risk of losing focus, of concentrating so hard on a paradigm or on a level of conflict that we limit our ability "to adapt ... to the utterly unpredictable, the entirely unknown," which is so often a part of modern war.67
65. The impressive research of Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War, 3 vols. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990), provides rather meagre results; see, e.g., vol. 2: 591-94, for the lessons of the Iran-Iraq war. They include: successful wars require clear grand strategy; force ratios are an uncertain measure of strength; airpower is difficult to use effectively; significant difficulties remain in employing combined arms or maneuver warfare; logistics and supply remain critical; etc., etc. 66. Jonathan Shimshoni, "Technology, Military Advantage, and World War I: A Case Study for Military Entrepreneurship," International Security 15 (Winter 1990-91): 199. 67. Howard, "Military Science in an Age of Peace," 7.
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