Book Time #22: Supplying War
Hi everyone,
Book Time will be taking the summer off. I’ll update you on my summer reading when I return.
In the meantime, here are some links to my recent work and a review of a book about military logistics. Have a great summer everyone!
My Latest Work
A $6 Billion Shortfall Has US Mass Transit Facing a Death Spiral
One Ship, $417 Million in New Tariffs: The Cost of Trump’s Trade War
Supplying War: Logistics from Wallenstein to Patton, Martin Van Creveld
One aspect of military history I have always found curious is how historians so often write about war with chess board logic. A general wants his army to go somewhere, and so it goes. In these books, commanders contend with shortages and harsh conditions, but rarely traffic jams.
This was something Martin Van Creveld noticed too, so he wrote this book in 1977. It is one of the grumpiest non-fiction books I have ever read. Van Creveld’s disdain for his entire discipline bleeds through each page. He can hardly contain his annoyance at the lack of attention logistics gets in the annals of military history. His disdain is sometimes funny, sometimes overwrought, and always overwritten, but I did appreciate this snipe:
The result is that, on the pages of military history books, armies frequently seem capable of moving in any direction at almost any speed and to almost any distance once their commanders have made up their minds to do so. In reality, they cannot, and failure to take cognizance of the fact has probably led to many more campaigns being ruined than ever were by enemy action.
I cannot in good faith recommend Supplying War as an entertaining read. This is a book by and for military historians. It is on a first-name basis with Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian military theorist. Van Creveld uses the phrase “well-known” to describe a guy named Liszt during the planning of the Franco-Prussian War. I thought this was an odd place for a 19th Century Hungarian pianist to pop up. When I flipped to the footnotes I learned Van Creveld was in fact referring to a Prussian supply officer with the same last name.
Still, I can recommend Supplying War if you’re the type of person who might go to an academic lecture in your free time. I found the details fascinating: how many tons of fodder a Napoleonic Army cavalry division required per day; how many biscuit rations your standard 19th Century field kitchen could make a day (and how many pounds of flour it required to do so); the limits of 19th Century military rail transport were as much in the station design as the track throughput; the type of locomotive engine mattered a great deal for which seasons to launch a campaign; and the old adage of “don’t invade Russia in winter” should perhaps be replaced with “don’t invade a country with a different railroad track gauge."
The scale of war can be observed from many different angles. It is typically captured with statistics like money spent, lives ended, bombs dropped, or tanks made. This book offers a fresh angle, where war is so big that it consumes all the food, jams all the roads, and obstructs all the railroads. More often than not, generals aren’t masterminds at a chess board. They’re sitting blindfolded in a room telling people to go places they cannot get to with supplies they don’t have to meet other people that are also not there.
The actual battles of war are hell. The time between the battles is a different kind of hell. It is the worst rush hour traffic you can possibly imagine.