Influential Military Historians

Sun Tzu

 

Sun Tzu a historian?

Alan Clark

Funny. In his "Barbarossa - The Russian-German Conflict 1941-45" :

1941 takes 183 pages,
1942 takes 90 pages,
1943 takes 93 pages,
1944 takes 48 pages,
1945 takes 48 pages.

Looks like a bit unbalanced to me, that is, when the Germans start taking it the fun seems to stop, but this is typical of the pre-Glasnost books on the GPW.

 

Sun Tzu a historian?



Funny. In his "Barbarossa - The Russian-German Conflict 1941-45" :

1941 takes 183 pages,
1942 takes 90 pages,
1943 takes 93 pages,
1944 takes 48 pages,
1945 takes 48 pages.

Looks like a bit unbalanced to me, that is, when the Germans start taking it the fun seems to stop, but this is typical of the pre-Glasnost books on the GPW.

Sounds like his other book The Donkeys, which spends most of its time on the earlier part of the war. Perhaps it is easier to criticise the early periods of the war.

Ross

 

Yes indeed the Donkeys spends much of its time on the early part of the war, as it would do being a study of the BEF in 1915.

I picked Clark as being influential for this book and not Barbarossa as it and the quote of the Lions led by Donkey's (for which there is not one jot of evidence to support it was ever spoken by Luddendorff) was at the forefront of all the revisionist history of the 1960's and did to a point influence the thinking of a generation.

I also picked T.E Lawrence as what he published in 1926 in so very relevant and influential today. David Petraeus, before assuming command In Iraq had studied Lawrence's writings at night. He took special notice of the difficulties Lawrence had faced in organizing the Bedouins. Petraeus had his senior officers read The Twenty-Seven Articles and The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Lawrence has also earned the compliment of being almost plagiarized writer (without a line of acknowledgment) in the U.S. Army field manual for counter insurgency of which Petraeus wrote the foreword.