Charles Phillips – Encyclopedia of Wars

Автор: Charles Phillips
Название книги: Encyclopedia of Wars
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Военная история
Страницы: 1453
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Describes the military aspect of wars – the causes of conflict, an enumeration of battles, and a summary of the outcome(s); also the social and political context in which the wars occurred. In three comprehensive volumes and approximately 2,000 A-to-Z entries this encyclopedia covers major wars, rebellions, and revolutions from 3,500 BCE

Attempting a comprehensive catalog and commentary
devoted to the wars of the world is, tragically enough, a
labor that might consume several lifetimes. We took about
10 years, during which time we incurred a heavy debt to
the authors whose works are listed in the bibliographies
that accompany each entry in this encyclopedia. In addition
to these books, which typically focus on a particular
war, historical period, nation, or personality, we had the
inestimable benefit of five masterpieces of military encyclopedia
making. First and foremost was George Childs
Kohn’s Dictionary of Wars (revised edition, New York:
Checkmark Books, 1999), which guided us in both our
selection and coverage of many of the wars included here.
Another indispensable guide was Micheal Clodfelter’s
Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference to Casualty
and Other Figures, 1500–2000 (second edition, Jefferson,
N.C.: McFarland and Company, 2002). In addition,
like all military historians, we made frequent and extensive
use of The Harper Encyclopedia of Military History:
From 3500 B.C. to the Present by R. Ernest Dupuy and
Trevor N. Dupuy (fourth edition, New York: Harper-
Collins, 1993); The Oxford Companion to Military History,
edited by Richard Holmes (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001); and The Oxford Companion to
American Military History, edited by John Whiteclay
Chambers II (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999).
In the creation of this encyclopedia, we also worked
directly with distinguished military historians, who contributed
to this book as writers of individual articles or as
readers on our editorial board. We acknowledge and offer
our thanks to Edward Countryman, Allan R. Millett, Mark
Parillo, John Childs, Ian Gentles, Geoffrey Parker, John
Lynn, Ian K. Steele, and, in memorium, to John Erickson.
Finally, no book sees the light of day without an editor,
and ours, Claudia Schaab of Facts On File, is one of
the very best. She kept our focus on the details but never
let us lose sight of the light at the end of the tunnel.

General George S. Patton once observed that, next to war,
all other human endeavors pale into puny insignificance.
Leaving aside for a moment questions about the morality
or desirability of warfare, Patton’s statement rings with
simple, if chilling, truth. For what other human endeavor
is so costly in money, materials, effort, pain, and life, or so
tasks the heart and mind, or encompasses such a range of
undertakings, from squalid acts of darkest secrecy and
utter despair to grand mobilizations of entire nations and
peoples? The Swiss historian Jean-Jacques Babel has estimated
that the 5,500 or so years of recorded history have
witnessed a meager total of 292 years of peace, and few of
those were ever so storied as the years of conflict. From
such literary works as the Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s
Illiad to such movies as Birth of a Nation and Saving Private
Ryan, authors and filmmakers have celebrated, even as historians
have chronicled, the exploits of a band of warriors
or a vast army of professional soldiers bent on shaping or
reshaping their patch of earth or the entire world through
the clash of arms.
Touching on every aspect of personal, social, political,
and economic life, war is such a complex phenomenon
that it cannot even be adequately defined, much less
explained—though not from lack of trying. From Sun Tzu
to Herodotus to Carl von Clausewitz to John Keegan, historians
and military theorists have grappled with the
essential nature and conduct of war, without arriving at an
analysis sufficiently broad to cover all its philosophical,
psychological, technological, and legal implications. In
general, theories of war reflect their times and the circumstances,
societies, and international systems in which they
are formulated.
Wars have always arisen, and arise today, from territorial
disputes, military rivalries, conflicts of ethnicity, and
strivings for commercial and economic advantage, and
they have always depended on, and depend on today,
pride, prejudice, coercion, envy, cupidity, competitiveness,
and a sense of injustice. But for much of the world before
the 17th century, these “reasons” for war were explained
and justified, at least for the participants, by religion.
Then, around the middle of the 17th century, Europeans
began to conceive of war as a legitimate means of furthering
the interests of individual sovereigns. Such wars, limited
in their objectives and scope, gave rise to the kind of
notions that Clausewitz would codify in his On War, which
he began to write in 1819. Thus, war came to be viewed as
a rational but limited instrument of national policy, which
began with a declaration of intent, was conducted by rules
that did not destroy the civilizations of those conducting
the war, and ended with a victory on the battlefield for one
side or the other, followed by an appropriate treaty settling
for all time the issues under dispute.
By the time Clausewitz’s masterpiece on the purposes,
tactics, and strategy of war was published in the 1830s, it
was already out of date, for the French Revolution had
intervened to create conditions that would ultimately
undermine all his assurances. The revolution increased the
size of the armed forces for European states from small
professional outfits to huge conscript armies, whose citizen-
soldiers needed more than reasons of state to risk their
lives and fortunes for their rulers. The objectives of warfare
were broadened from the conquest of this or that
sliver of a kingdom to the spread of revolutionary ideals,
and through this ideological back door something like the
fervor of religion slipped back into war along with the
mass of conscripts. Once again wars needed to be in some
sense “holy” or, in the more secular lexicon of the times,
“just.”
Clausewitz had discussed the concept of “total war,”
combat waged not just by one army against another but by
armies against armies and civilian or noncombatant populations.
The American Civil War of 1861–65 gave horrific
body to that concept; it was a conflict fought by huge conscripted
armies for what the North at least claimed was a
purely just cause—that is, to destroy the social institution
of slavery. As the chief practitioner of total war on American
soil, William Tecumseh Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant’s
most important general, explained that the object of his
war had become not to defeat the enemy’s army but to
destroy the society that supported it. The Civil War was
thus a truly modern war in the sense that it consisted of
the mobilization of entire populations and economies for a
prolonged period of time. Sherman’s infamous March to
the Sea gave the world a foretaste of just how destructive
ideologically driven total warfare might become.
In America’s Civil War, too, the world saw an early
example of how the modern technology of combat could
outstrip its manpower. The massive casualties of the Civil
War battlefields were a harbinger of trench warfare in
World War I. In that conflict mass mobilizations brought
soldiers to die by the millions on the tiny strips of territory
between trenches, “no man’s land” desperately defended
by machine guns and rapid-fire artillery no human army
could withstand. The notion of war as a rational instrument
of state policy vanished in the din of high explosives
and the lung-corroding coruscations of mustard gas.
Henceforth, in modern times war, if still considered an
instrument of state policy, could only be undertaken (or, at
least, sustained) if a nation were convinced (or terrified
into accepting) that its most vital interests, involving its
very survival, were at stake, which was, of course, precisely
what happened in World War II.
There it was the rise of ideology to the level of religious
fanaticism that sparked the conflict. The Allies billed
their efforts not so much as a war to protect their countries
against an expanding Germany, Japan, and Italy, but as a
war to end the evils of Nazism and fascism and the horrors
they visited upon the world. The technology developed in
World War II made “total war” a nightmare reality, one
that no rational nation would ever undertake merely to
expand its territory.
As in the days of religious war, only overarching ideologies
now justified conflict between nation-states and
combinations of nation-states. However, World War II was
ended with a weapon, the atomic bomb, clearly capable of
being developed into a means to end civilization itself. As
a result, after World War II those nations with the technology
to destroy one another avoided direct and total war—
World War III—fighting, instead, ideological wars full of
clandestine operations, sabotage, and “covert” actions,
breaking out into open conflict only among proxy states—
small, local, border conflicts, often interminable, often
held in check by the larger powers’ unwillingness to see
conflicts spread from their “clients” to themselves. For if
the battle came to them, thermonuclear retaliation loomed
as a universally self-defeating possibility.
By the end of the 20th century the cost of the sophisticated
technology needed to maintain the ideological cold
war between “communism” and “democracy” had helped
mightily to bankrupt the communist “bloc,” while the
technology itself had made many of the old definitions of
war somewhat more suspect. Early 21st-century warfare
has been almost exclusively ideological, that is to say, religious,
and almost always either clandestine or limited and
“asymmetrical.” When the United States went to war with
Muslim countries in the Middle East or Africa, it fought
with machines rather than men, suffering only minimal
conflict casualties, while the smaller states, lacking the
remote-controlled hardware, turned to “terror,” sneak
attacks, even suicidal attacks against enemy civilians in
order to claim any kind of victory at all.
There have always been conflicts that did not fit the
various definitions for wars between nation-states or coalitions
of nation-states: civil wars between rival claimants
for sovereignty in a state; struggles by ethnic, religious, or
social enclaves for civil, political, or economic recognition
or power coups; insurrections, revolts, rebellions, and
uprisings that might, and sometimes did, lead to revolutions.
And there have always been conquests and invasions,
sieges and massacres, raids and riots with some of
the aspects of larger wars and revolutions. In the post–cold
war international scene, however, these took on added significance
because they represented the more common
kind of conflict, the kind with potential for spreading.
Most dangerous of all were those conflicts between wellarmed
but middling powers—Iraq and Iran, Israel and the
Palestinians, India and Pakistan—whose technologies
were sophisticated enough to ignite a larger, perhaps even
a world-consuming, war.
Whatever horrors recent events have visited upon the
world—and, on September 11, 2001, upon the United
States of America—these events have wreaked havoc on
even the best attempts to define war. Modern historians
have often tried to avoid the narrow and legal definitions
prevalent in the 19th century, which limited the label of
war to those conflicts formally declared between states
(and thus, not altogether incidentally, turned a blind eye
to colonial expansions and the suppression of native populations).
These definitions frequently fail to include such
conflicts as insurrections, banditry, or piracy, which are
occasionally significant and often the only kinds of war
the colonized or the politically suppressed can conduct.
Most military historians also wish to understand war, even
when defined broadly, as embracing armed conflict on a
larger scale, and they typically exclude conflicts of fewer
than 50,000 combatants. But this would exclude, for
example, all the North American Indian wars with the
United States during the 19th century.
Clearly, war is and has always been as much and more
a social phenomenon as a military one. For this reason,
this encyclopedia focuses not only on details of the fighting—
discussions of causes of conflict, enumerations of
battles, summaries of the outcomes—but also on the social
and political contexts in which the wars occurred. Sometimes
these are straightforward enough, sometimes they
are more complicated, so the length of an entry is not
always keyed to the size of the conflict or the number of
casualties. We have tried to look at conflicts as sometimes
opening a window on a wider picture rather than always
viewing the broader history merely as a context for the
conflict. For wars are interesting to many not for what
they say about strictly military history but for what they
say about history in the broadest sense.
We do not ignore the formalities of war that are the
bone and sinew of much military history. Each entry
includes a handy summary, an at-a-glance look at the war
in question, which contains many of the basics usually
included in military histories: a list of the belligerents, a
statement of the causes of the war, the date of its declaration
(if any), the numbers (where known) of those under
arms and the casualties they suffered, a summary of the
outcome, and (where appropriate) the names and dates of
the treaties or documents ending the conflict. (Unless
otherwise noted, the numbers of personnel under arms
represent the maximum strength of forces at their peak
and are not cumulative numbers over time; casualty figures,
however, represent cumulative totals for the duration
of the conflict, except where otherwise specifically noted.)
In each entry this summary is followed by a narrative discussion
of the war, its social context, the major battles and
events of the war, and its wider significance.
No work, even one of this size, can cover every conflict,
but we aim at least for a fully exemplary representation
of war throughout history. For example, the reader will
find entries on classical and medieval times as well as on
the wars of modern Europe. Here are the Chinese dynastic
wars as well as the Napoleonic Wars, the wars of the British
colonial empire as well as the American Civil War, regional
conflicts and the world wars of the 20th century, small wars
and large, wars significant for their diplomacy and politics
as well as those significant for their tactics and strategy.
Given our imagined typical user—the American student of
war—we have placed a slightly greater emphasis on North
American conflicts. Some of the wars included are part of
larger conflicts or related to other wars, past or present, and
to emphasize these connections we have cross-referenced
other relevant entries with SMALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Some
wars are known by several different names. In these
instances, we have used the name we judge most common
and familiar and have included the alternates in parentheses
after the title of each entry. If the alternate names are
themselves sufficiently well known, or if we have grouped
conflicts in a way different from more traditional texts, we
cite the name and direct the reader to the appropriate entry
or entries. Entries are followed by suggestions for further
reading, and both a bibliography of major texts on war and
a chronological list of the wars appear in the final volume
of the encyclopedia. Finally, we have tried to create a readable
work, one that might be perused for pleasure as well as
consulted for specific information, one aimed at serving a
general public as well as one especially useful to students
and teachers of history at all levels.