Why Teach Military History?
Posted by Yan Mann on November 8, 2007
This was recently posted (about three weeks ago) on the discussion group “H-War,” thought it was worth reading.
WHY TEACH MILITARY HISTORY?
by Jeremy Black
The usual criticism against the teaching of military history
is that it in some way encourages bellicosity, that it is
somehow morally questionable and actually undesirable in the
academy at any level. However, war, though undesirable in
many of its attributes, and while it involves people killing
and being willing or prepared to be killed, can in fact
serve purposes which we regard as necessary–for example,
liberty, civic patriotism, and international order. Indeed,
nobody, including the UN, doubts that just war properly
conceived is an appropriate recourse in international law
and the maintenance of international order. War cannot be
wished away. It has played a major role in the formation of
individual states and societies and in maintaining
international order.
HISTORICAL UNDETERMINISM
Too often history is taught as if it were a clear linear
process in which we know what is going to happen, we know
the way the world was going to be, and in some respects
there is an inevitability about it. But people at the time
had no sense of inevitability about it. The Allies who went
out in 1917-18 were unsure what the consequences would be
for them of the collapse of Russia, the communist
revolution, Russia’s leaving the war, and the Treaty of
Brest-Litovsk between Russia and the Central Powers that
permitted the Germans to move all their divisions from the
eastern front back to the western front. When two powers
start a war, generally both sides think they can win, and at
least one of them is usually wrong. Understanding the
conditionality of it is very important, that the activities
of those who take part in war–civilians on the home front,
the troops themselves, commanders trying to plan options and
strategies-are all important, because the future is in no
way predictable and determined. A very important moral
aspect of education is that all of us in any scenario–
military or civil society–are part of a process in which
what happens is not determined. All of us have a role to
play.
HISTORICAL MEMORY
One frequently hears observations such as, for example,
“counterinsurgency struggles are bound to fail.” Well, some
of them do fail. Equally, since 1945, many of them
succeeded. There is no deterministic viewpoint that tells
you that any given stage is bound to happen. It is good to
introduce students to the uncertainty of the past, because
it helps them begin to think about the uncertainty of both
the present and the future, an uncertainty that demands
their attention, which suggests that history, present
politics, the future, are not things one sits back and
watches like a spectator, but in which one’s own actions or
choices not to act can influence the process.
Of course, one can pull out analogies from the past that
help people think but also ones that are not carefully
thought through. But it is nonetheless important for any
society to have some sense of focus on the past. If one has
no sense of focus on the past for judgment, then from where
are people to get their ideas? The argument could be made
that one responds to every circumstance in the immediate
present by judging one’s interests and concerns at that
moment, that there’s nothing from the past one needs to
conceive of because the past is in some way dead, history
cannot be repeated. In terms of war, one might argue that,
because all of the weaponry of earlier wars is as outdated
as the mammoth or the catapult.
In practical terms, however, no matter how strongly
societies believe that they can reject the past, the only
way they can do so is by a quasi-genocidal destruction of
every attribute of it. In modern times, the only society
that has sought to completely reject the past is the Pol Pot
regime in Cambodia, and it did not work. It was also
astonishingly vicious. But the general postulate is more
important, that people look to the past when they’re trying
to understand the present. They have a group of common
memories that in part frame national identity, a sense of
patriotism. So the way people use remarks about issues from
the past in order to discuss policy today may be flawed–for
example, the Munich analogy of appeasement of dictators in
1938 applied subsequently in other contexts–but it reflects
the sense that there is a possibility, a need, to explain
things with reference to a common memory.
In the case of war, this is even more acutely the need. In
waging war, one is asking people to do what they
understandably do not want to do, which is to endure great
sacrifices and even death. It is therefore important to look
to some sense of continuity in order to draw on historical
memories that help to make people feel that however
difficult this is, it is in some way a necessary purpose.
All of us can justifiably deplore the rather crude sort of
blood-and-earth patriotism that was seen in, say, Europe in
1914, which was naive, foolish, and atavistic. But in order
to exist in a community, you have to have some willingness
to give up things for the greater whole. Ordinarily, the
social civility and order required for membership in the
community does not involve terrible constraints upon people.
But of course, military confrontation and war are very
different.
HOW TO TEACH MILITARY HISTORY
There is an extensive body of material one can use in
teaching students of every age about military affairs, the
conduct of war, the nature of military institutions, and
what war means for individual participants, both soldiers
and civilians. Museums such as the First Division’s have
enormous collections of the material culture of war, and for
the last 150 years there are extensive photographic
archives. We now also have extensive film archives going
back for nearly a century of war and extensive interviews,
both filmed and taped, more recently. Students can also meet
and interview people who lived through World War II, to
record living history. All these sources can interact to
give the student a vivid sense of what war means.
It is more difficult to look at the other side of the hill,
but still a worthwhile exercise for students in the upper
high school grades. This means that if you are, for example,
talking about the Civil War, look at both the Confederate
and Union viewpoints of the war. If you’re looking at
international conflicts, try to understand the experience of
war from the other side, without necessarily sympathizing
with that viewpoint. This is particularly useful for
students who might end up serving in the military, because
one can only know how best to wage war by understanding how
one’s opponents are likely to perceive one’s actions.
Military history encompasses a wide range of sub-subjects.
There is the operational history that is understood to be
military history on the History Channel, the doings and
campaigns and battles of military formation, but there is
much more than that. Let’s look at a few.
First, there is the relationship between war and the
development of states. After all, it is through war that
states developed. The U.S. bears the origins it has because
it arose as a result of a successful war of independence.
Through war again, the U.S. expanded from the Atlantic to
the Pacific: conflicts with Native Americans, war with the
Mexicans, the occupation of Florida. The development of the
American state, finally and most traumatically with the
Civil War, would have been totally different without war.
A second major aspect of military history is war and the
international order. It is through war that the
relationships among states have been molded and influenced.
States that do well economically tend to demand a role and
place in the international order that accords with their
views, and until very recently they have pursued this
through violence. It is entirely possible that military
preparedness will also play a role in how they pursue it in
the future. Some have argued on the obsolescence of war,
which may be true at the level of great powers, since no one
wants to engage in a nuclear conflict. But it is equally
possible that military confrontation short of war will be an
important aspect of the military history of the future, and
we need to understand what will and will not be achieved
through such processes.
A third aspect is what is known as “war and society,” what
used to be called “new military history.” War and society
covers an enormous range of topics, such as the experience
of women in war and war and environment. One can also look
at the military itself as a society. If you think for
example of the First Division in World War I, the world it
came from, you’re talking about large numbers of men taken
away or volunteering to leave their home communities and
forming a new social order in which one had to rapidly
introduce ways of behavior that fulfilled the tasks of the
military. All of those are important aspects of war and
society, and in order to understand military effectiveness,
you have to understand how armies work as societies–what
hierarchy, deference, order, independence, and autonomy mean
in a military context.
A fourth concerns war and culture. War has had an enormously
important impact on culture. The triumphant display of power
through conflict was long a major theme of cultural output,
and more recently one sees criticism of the horrors of war.
Both cultural themes can be seen in the arts. One can
juxtapose to upper-level high school students images of the
triumphalist account of the culture of war and the critical
account. One can contrast Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory,
an astonishing piece written to commemorate Wellington’s
victory at the Battle of Victoria over the French, with
perhaps Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1962) or
Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960); or
Picasso’s Guernica (1937) with an account from the Times of
the bombing, then a German propaganda piece claiming that
Guernica was never bombed. Doing so makes for an interesting
lesson in how war is open to different accounts, and how
those different accounts are sometimes heavily propagandist.
As one moves into looking at the experience since World War
II, there are some wars of course of which the records are
relatively dim. For the war in which the largest number of
people–over 5 million–were killed in the last fifteen
years, the Congo war, we have very few reliable sources and
very little by way of good film material suitable to show
students. But for other wars there is a great amount of
material from which teachers can draw to help students
understand (a) the experience of war, (b) the purpose of
war, and (c) the fact that war means different things around
the world. It’s tremendously valuable for Western students
to understand that most war in the world is not a matter of
Western powers; much of the war in the world is in South
Asia or subsaharan Africa, and it is often an aspect of
conflict that responds to and reflects the natures of those
societies. Students need to understand what terms like
tribalism and ethnic conflict mean if they are to understand
the world in which they live. Through looking at recent war,
one is helping to unlock students to understand that the
world in which they live involves complex issues, that these
issues are divisive, that the divisions involve enormous
sacrifices on the part of many of the people involved, and
that these pose real questions for the U.S., as for other
powers, as to how to respond and whether or not a response
will be successful.
CONCLUSION
Teaching military history is a key element of civic
education, which is an important dimension of society. It is
a key element of patriotism, encouraging people to
understand their own country in the context of a world in
which they have their own values, in which their own country
is important and central, but their country is not in
isolation, it interacts with others. Any healthy society
must encourage a mature debate about values and rights and
responsibility, especially that responsibility covered by
military history–namely, those occasions when citizens must
risk their lives for their beliefs.
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