Decisive Battles of the Western World

JFC Fuller's 3 volume opus on military history.

If Oman's Art of War is one of the must have tomes in any armchair military historian's library, then the other must be JFC Fuller's exhaustive, 3 volume, history of warfare in the western world. Fuller himself was a man of great military vision, being the person who first envisaged the notion of combined arms that became known as 'Blitzkrieg', as put forward in his Plan 1919 when working for the British Chiefs of Staff. His research and knowledge of the decisive military actions that he covers is exhaustive and still, after 60 years, sets the benchmark for the genre. His style of writing is clear, incisive and is able to give a feel of what it was like to be there amongst the blood and guts.

What is interesting is the battles he chose to ignore - there is no mention of Leuctra, Bosworth Field, Gettysburg, Marengo or, surprisingly Austerlitz, most of which I would have thought could have been considered to have been of sufficient impact to be mentioned. It is interesting to note that Fuller, given his position in the British military, was extremely critical of the Western powers in both WWI and WWII. He was particularly critical of Churchill's Dardanelles campaign and Wilson's decision to bring the US into the war in 1917 when American neutrality could have dictated peace terms over a year before the final Armistice. He was also somewhat scornful of the way that the Allied strategic goal in WWII was conducted, and considered D-Day to be a huge strategic blunder, considering the positions of the Italian and Eastern fronts in 1943 which handed much of Eastern Europe to the Soviets - or Asiatic hordes as he was so keen to call them. He may be overstating the case somewhat as his obvious disdain for anything Bolshevik or Soviet clearly shows through in his writing.

Fuller does posit one fascinating 'what if' scenario. Which is this: Assume that Wilson had kept America neutral in 1917 and the Western powers had gone to the US for a negotiated peace what would have been the consequences? The Russian Revolution may never have happened, and the Tsars remained in power and thus been no Communist state and no Stalin. The battles Caporetto and then Vittorio- Veneto would never have happened meaning that Mussolini may well have kept to his career as a journalist rather than entering politics. And, of course, there would have been no punitive peace terms on Germany which was one of the major causes of discontent and breeding grounds for Hitler's support in the inter-war years. How different a world would we live in now if Wilson had not acted the way he did.