Desert
Battle: Comparative Perspectives
Lt Col Harold E. Raugh, Jr., United States Army (Retd) reviews these books exclusively for DJ.
German General Erwin Rommel, the so-called “Desert Fox”, fought in the Western Desert of Egypt and Libya from 1941 to 1943 and called the desert war “a war without hatred”. One of his subordinates, Major General Johann von Ravenstein, believed it to be “a gentleman’s war”. “Men in the desert armies,” noted one British military historian, “could concentrate on the purely military aspect of warfare: the desert conflict remained largely divorced from those political or ideological influences which polluted the campaigns in Russia or in Europe.”
Even though leading practitioners and proponents of desert warfare may consider it “a war without hatred” or “a gentleman’s war”, warfare in the desert is not sanitized, glamorous, or romantic. The heat and aridity of the desert are enervating and can kill the unwary or unprepared. The desert does not provide any means of sustainment or logistical support. Sand penetrates even the smallest opening in clothes, equipment, and weapons. Indeed, one of the main purposes of this book, according to author Bruce Allen Watson, is to “throw down the gauntlet before those who think desert battle a great romance” (p. ix).
The author, Professor Emeritus of Art History at Diablo Valley College, intends to accomplish this by chronicling six “desert” military campaigns. The book begins with a frequently error-filled (with some dozen factual and spelling errors in less than that many pages) narrative and assessment of Rommel’s first advance into Cyrenaica, in April 1941. The first chapter focuses not so much on Rommel’s accomplishments, as on the creation of the “Rommel legend” and its arguably dominant influence on contemporary perceptions of desert warfare. A chapter describing the physical characteristics of desert regions follows.
Napoleon’s 1798-99 Egyptian campaign, and the resultant privations of the ill-prepared French force unfamiliar with a desert environment, is the first military operation described. This chapter establishes a pattern for those that follow, containing much irrelevant and extraneous material and gratuitous paragraphs of secondary-source information. The British 1850-1852 campaign on the North-West Frontier of India is narrated next, but is of little relevance to the book’s purported theme, since it was fought mainly on mountainous terrain. It is followed by the 1916-1918 British campaign in Mesopotamia, and the first British offensive in the Western Desert, Operation “Compass”, 1940-1941. The author then analyzes the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, another odd choice; the 1956 Arab-Israeli War — the first “100-hour war” — would have provided a much more viable comparative analysis.
The penultimate chapter of the book covers the 1991 Gulf War. This permits the author to intensify his seemingly anti-American rhetoric that began on p. 25 with, within the context of European imperialism, “The United States, not to be left out, expanded into the southwest deserts, where any dead Indian was a good one.” Ludicrously, Watson buttresses his anti-American sentiments with comments from retired Colonel David Hackworth, a disenchanted, disgruntled Vietnam War veteran.
In “Desert Battle: Trends and Perspectives”, the book’s final chapter, the author identifies six factors — proximity to water, mobility, increase in battlefield size, use of combined armed forces, enhanced lethality, and the recurring nature of deserts as battle zones — which he considers trends unique to desert warfare. The first, proximity to water, can be discarded due to its ambiguity and relativity. The next four factors are not unique to desert battles, but are facets in the development and evolution of warfare in general. Positing that warfare will occur again on the same desert battlefields is as profound as suggesting that Europe has in the past, and probably will again in the future, serve as a venue for armed conflict.
The author then embarks on a verbose and muddled diatribe on the relationship between a war of annihilation and the concepts of battlefield victory. A jeremiad on American involvement in Somalia, the role of the United Nations in future conflict resolution, and a condemnation of the “Western” — and American — use of overwhelming force and lethality (to minimize US casualties, an idea which apparently escapes the author) as a response to “small” wars, concludes the book.
Other features of this book deserve comment. The 11 maps are of limited value, since none of them have distance scales or direction indicators. The place names on some of the maps are too small to read clearly, and there is also uncertainty on a few maps as to the meaning (mountainous terrain or depressions?) of sketched symbols. The selected bibliography contains many useful references, but many are superfluous, and other recent additions to the scholarship on the topic are inexplicably missing. While some of the haphazardly placed photographs are quite interesting, others are of dubious relevance to the text.
In the preface to Desert Battle, the author writes
that one purpose of this “study of the development of desert battle [is
to] fill the void” (p. ix) in the historiography of this topic of
contemporary interest. However,
until a better-researched, more accurate, and less polemical study, with
relevant, viable, and objective case studies and conclusions, is written,
this void (with the possible exception of Bryan Perrett’s 1988 Desert
Warfare) will remain. n
(Republished with author’s permission from Middle East Journal 50 (Autumn 1996): 613-614.
