Feeding Mars

Book Review

Reviews by "Old Duffer"

edited by John Lynn

This is a reprint of a notable book on logistics. John Lynn opens the batting by clobbering Van Creveld (the sine qua non of the book) over his wobbly calculations of army supply requirements. Lynn believes the difference between Napoleon and (say) the Duc de Luxembourg (apart from the former being a loser) was that the former's army was filled with patriotic zeal and would put up with poor rations, but the latter's would not. This seems slightly at variance with the anti-zeal view of Lynn in his Bayonets of the Republic.

Walter Kaegi opens the early period essays with one on the Byzantine logistical system. The trouble is he knows little of that system and can merely point to the distances, the numbers, and the problems. It is clear evidence that the Byzantines must have known how to do something, but quite what this was eludes us. Similarly the self-referencing Bernhard Bachrach cannot really tell us much about logistics in the Dark Ages. He can however once again point to the impressive feats of Offa and Charlemagne building major works, the logistic weight of Charles' Saxon campaigns and of William the Bastard. Both essayists cannot supply answers but can demonstrate someone had done the homework back then.

The 1500-1815 sections include the best essays. John Guilmartin (he of Gunpowder and Galleys) discusses Spanish naval logistics in the 16th Century. John Lynn covers the fortress mentality (which was created he reckons as an instrument of attritional war to guard one's own tax base and threaten the enemy's) of Louis XIV's campaigns. Finally John Shy explains the difficulties of supplying the American rebel scum of the AWI due to the lack of a strong road structure and paucity of excess methods of transport in the colonial economy.

The modern section is by far the weakest. Robert Bruce on why the Union army's R&D did not work, they could have had breechloaders (and they should have had breechloaders). Of course Mr Bruce has those handy-dandy Hindsight Goggles! Jon Sumida drones on about the logistics of the British Navy, Daniel Beaver takes us into the exciting world of US Army truck selection and Joel Myerson finishes of with supplying the Vietnam War.

For so notable a work one must comment on the lack of many strong essays. At the stage this first appeared the topic was perhaps new and exciting and the commentators a bit thin on the ground. In this at least we have improved.

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© Copyright 1999 by Charles and Teresa Vasey.
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