How are your book choices related?
Of the five books I have chosen, two of them are analyzes of war as a whole, that is, clausewitz on war and sun tzu, the art of war. the other three describe the actual experience of the war as it is fought, giving a three-dimensional picture of the entire activity.
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I’d like to start with clausewitz, who sets the whole scene. Clauswitz himself was a Prussian general who fought in the Napoleonic Wars from start to finish and saw the whole nature of war change. it began in the 1790s and in the early years of the French revolution, when regular armies were still fighting the war. at the end, in 1815, it was being fought by entire nations. the very limited activity of eighteenth-century warfare had expanded into something like the total warfare that would distinguish warfare in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. so he had him analyze the whole thing and try to see what the essence of the war was and how it was changed by its political, ideological and social context.
I know some people consider the “clausewitz war” to be over. would you agree with that?
Clausewitz’s definition of war applies to all the various changing natures of war. It comes from giving a broad analysis of what war is and what war was going to be, and then focusing on the type of war that he experienced. From the point of view of his own experience, much of what he said has changed and is no longer relevant, but in general his analysis of war and the nature of war and the problems facing anyone who goes to the war are still valid now. as they were then. ‘clausewitz war’, as it describes the war he experienced in his own lifetime, is a very narrow and misleading interpretation of him. First of all, he says that war must be considered as a method of conducting national strategy, the way in which nations or states conduct their relations with each other. the use of force is a tool that they use in that. the use of force is determined by state policy and applies regardless of the type of force used. certainly the kind of force that people use now is quite different from what was used in napoleonic times, but the use of force as a political tool is still around, both in the application of a no-fly zone to libya and when the duke of wellington was fighting Napoleonic armies on the peninsula. To that extent, Clausewitz remains a universal guide to the nature and conduct of war.
let’s move on to the sun tzu.
sun tzu is completely out of the western way of seeing politics and states. for him, war was an art and an art practiced by generals, by individual commanders. in a way it was a game and it describes how seemingly weak players can outsmart strong players, how strong players can apparently misuse their strength to be baffled by weak players, how warfare is actually determined by the mental caliber of actual fighting generals. On the one hand, it was a much more limited way of looking at war, but on the other, it was much more inventive and imaginative.
And how did you think weak players could outwit stronger players?
oh, you’ll have to read it. It is not very long, the fact is that he considers war as a kind of chess, in which all kinds of players can play against each other. He strongly influenced Mao Zedong and developed a way of looking at war, which Mao Zedong then used first against the Japanese and then against his rivals. he was basically a rebel, building up from the status of a rebel commander in a small outpost in the provinces until he drove out the Japanese, the nationalists and the Americans and was ruling all of china by using entirely different kinds of tricks than It took Western armies completely by surprise. Those ideas have been inherited by rebels and guerrillas over the last three or four decades, and Sun Tzu is considered a valuable guide to irregular or partisan warfare.
can you give me an example of one of the tricks that sun tzu suggests to use?
The main thing he said was that if you are weak you must give the appearance of being strong and if you are strong you must give the appearance of being weak. you persuade people that you are weak and you are going to be a pushover for the adversary to attack.
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It would be quite difficult for the United States to pretend to be weak. there is so much public knowledge these days.
well, let me give you an example. in the second world war, when we british were very, very weak in dealing with the germans, we used deception to give the impression that we and the americans had built up a huge army, so that when we landed in normandy and they were very vulnerable there, the germans didn’t use their full force to destroy us because they believed we were going to land at the pas de calais with a much stronger force at any moment. in fact we didn’t have that strength, but the germans retained much of their strength, which made it possible for us to establish ourselves in normandy as we did. that was a prime example of sun tzu’s kind of strategy, although we had never heard of him then.
Were you personally involved?
I wasn’t personally involved in that particular part. I was in Italy at the time. I could talk about it for a long, long time. I was a very young infantry officer. i landed in salerno and we found ourselves facing some very steep mountains, and with much, much difficulty we plodded on until we got to austria and then we stopped.
That wasn’t a long time.
well, it took from September 1943 to August 1945 and it seemed like a long time, I must tell you.
I think the Red Badge of Valor is a novel about the American Civil War?
I chose these following three examples from the actual experience of war. this is a novel about a young soldier volunteering in the american civil war who has no war experience, no idea if he will be brave or cowardly. the way he suddenly finds himself caught up in a battle is absolutely brilliant in his depiction of the battle itself and the emotions he feels, the way he reacts, the shock of fear, horror, awe, exhilaration , triumph, exhaustion, hunger flooding him in great waves. he stumbles through these battles and emerges at the end saying, so it was and I survived. even if one has no interest in war and doesn’t like the idea, it’s a great novel. it’s very short, incredibly vivid, and I’d put it on my list of the top 12 books everyone should read.
Do you lose your idealism in the process?
You don’t start out as a great idealist. war is like an exam. you are discovering the kind of person you are. I had my own exam. Like the hero of this novel, I started out not knowing what to expect, not knowing how I was going to behave. was I going to be a coward? was it going to be heroic? was it going to be clever? how was I going to deal with all this? in the end he had gone through a series of experiences that showed me the kind of person he was. at the end of the war I was an adult. one of the few things that war helps to do is to know oneself in depth. there are some things you discover about yourself that are unfortunate and others that are quite surprising.
do you think that young people today, who have not fought in any war, are quite inexperienced in comparison?
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Well, they’ve been through different kinds of experiences that have made them mature, but war is a process of maturation and there is nothing like it in the world. people are trying to kill you and you find yourself in a situation where people are really trying to get you. it is very interesting and scary. there is nothing like it in civilian life. fear is a great tester of one’s character.
What I find when talking to people who have fought is that they start out very clear about what they are fighting for, but after all the horror, it becomes much less straightforward.
yes. Yes. of course. a lot less. it is a very complicated business and personal experience is a very interesting test.
It’s interesting that you go back to personal experience, because it often starts out as a pretty grand mission for one’s country.
It really comes down to, regardless of who the enemy is and what the cause is, to some people who are trying to kill you and it’s your job to try to kill them. it becomes very basic to that extent. I certainly did not go to war in a state of high idealism. I found myself in an intensely unpleasant situation where war seemed to be a necessity and my participation in it at that particular age was also a necessity. I would have been a little relieved if I hadn’t had to, but as it was, it was a job that had to be done. I think an older generation who participated in the first world war had higher expectations and higher ideals of the kind that I certainly didn’t have, if only because the first world war had removed that from people.
tell me about c s forester’s book.
The General is about the experience of high command, what it’s like to have to make terribly difficult decisions that risk the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. he also shows the experience of someone who starts out with lofty ideals about how a war should be fought and then exposes himself to the storm of industrial warfare. a British Army officer earns his spurs in the Boer War, and therefore views the war with all the idealistic belief and heroism that had hitherto been appropriate to the conduct of the war, although even in 1900 things they had begun to look a bit more complicated. he then finds himself in command of a battalion in 1914 at the very beginning of the first world war, thrown into the midst of the holocaust of the western front. he shows all the qualities of courage, initiative, self-confidence and good leadership and is quickly promoted and ends up commanding an army corps in 1917 with hundreds of thousands of men under his command. is engaged in a kind of war for which there was no precedent, a war in which casualties numbered not in the hundreds or thousands, but in the tens of thousands, where the kind of tactics that had been useful for hundreds of years now they were not helpful. valid and they were suicidal. where everything he had learned as a soldier and raised to believe as a knight ceased to make any kind of sense, and this describes the way he adapts to this, without much success. explains why the war on the Western Front was fought the way it was.
I have never read a book that describes the subject so clearly. not the drama, the tragedy and the sleaze of the trenches, which has been agonizingly well described, but what it was like to have to put these people into action and put them through everything. This is a book that has been largely forgotten, but one that I highly recommend to anyone who wants to understand the First World War. it’s very short c s forester was a very important novelist, the author of the hornblower series about the napoleonic wars and all those qualities of courage, heroism and patriotism, which a century later brought disaster.
Do you talk about how you felt afterwards? the other day i was in the map room under whitehall, and at the time, in world war two, they were just trying to win, but now, looking at all the pins all over the world, they seem to represent mass slaughter. p>
the point is that what matters at that moment is that you have to win. what really matters on the front line is courage, what really matters on the high command is skill and wisdom and cunning and the pins on a map that you try to move in such a way that you achieve a result with the least possible harm to your our people. the people in the war rooms in whitehall…remember those people were being bombed almost every night from the air. they are not miles behind the lines. they are in the thick of it. what they are seeing, much more than troops on the ground, is moving ships to keep supply lines open and safe from submarines. that was the way the war could be lost, almost lost. the agonizing emotions they must have felt seeing these convoys being launched across the Atlantic and falling into the clutches of submarines and sinking, not simply losing the lives of men, but also the goods, food, ammunition that made it possible to carry out the war at all. there was a sense that this is a war that could be lost, is being lost, and are the things we are doing going to save us? It’s not just a game, it’s existential. it’s about survival. it’s that kind of devastating responsibility on people’s shoulders that you have to keep in mind.
many people have chosen vasily grossman’s book.
yes, life and destiny. I wanted a book about the second world war and where that war was really fought, aside from the atlantic, was on the eastern front between the german and russian armies. Vasily Grossman was involved in the Battle of Stalingrad, but he was also a front-line spectator of the rest of the war. He set out to write the equivalent of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. well, he wasn’t very successful in doing that, but it’s nonetheless an amazing and terrifying account, not just of the battles, but of the armies that fight them. not just armies, but regimes. Of course, behind the German army was the Nazi regime, the holocaust, not only of the Jews but of the massacres that occurred as the German army advanced, committing mass murder of the civilian populations that they invaded. not to get rid of the partisans but because they were eliminating the Jews, eliminating the Ukrainians, and eliminating anyone who stood in their way to conquer these countries. they were joined by other nationalities who also did their dirty work for them. then there is the combination of the nightmare of mass murder, mass shooting and the nightmare of the front lines.
On the other side are the Russians, who are desperately fighting to protect their own country, commanded by a fanatical regime, concerned not only with defeating the Germans, but also with preserving a totalitarian regime and eliminating anyone it believes represents a threat to them. So, in the Russian Army, a general who is fighting skillfully, bravely, bravely against terrible odds, suddenly finds himself yanked from the front line because he’s deemed politically unreliable and is either shot or sent to a prison camp. behind all of them are these terrible camps without which the Soviet regime could never have survived. so there is total warfare in its most terrifying form in a way that has rarely been seen before in human history. a nightmarish world in which force, violence and terror permeate not only the front lines but also the very societies of the people who fight. it is a nightmarish book and a nightmarish experience. although it is a very thick book and not easy to read, anyone who wants to understand what war can be like in its most extreme form has to read it.
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