Ohio History Journal

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

 

 

 

With Shield and Sword: American Military Affairs, Colonial Times to the Pres-

ent. By Warren W. Hassler, Jr. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1982. x

+462 p.; maps, notes, selected bibliography, index. $29.50.)

 

This book is the first comprehensive history of the American military past

since Walter Millis's Arms and Men: A Study in American Mlitary History

(1955). T. Harry Williams's The History of American Wars: From 1745 to 1918

(1981) might have claimed that position had not its author's untimely death

cut the account short at the close of the First World War. Thus With Shield

and Sword fills a need for an up-to-date survey, and those seeking out the de-

tails of battles and campaigns and of the evolution of military institutions will

leave copies of it well-thumbed.

Battles and campaigns must be mentioned first among its contents, howev-

er, because the book is very much unlike Millis's and seems paradoxically

old-fashioned when compared with that work of nearly a generation ago.

Hassler offers little to compare with Millis's stimulating interpretative judg-

ments or his sweeping synthesizing of detail into a larger whole. Rather, the

strongest sections of Hassler's book are its combat narratives in the most tra-

ditional style of military history. While Hassler does not overlook institution-

al history in peace as well as in war, so that he touches all the appropriate

bases as far as supplying essential information is concerned, his heart clearly

belongs to his tales of battle, and there is an almost perfunctory quality about

the passages of institutional history.

A further difficulty is Hassler's penchant, particularly evident when he de-

parts from combat, for citing the opinions of other historians or military crit-

ics whom he considers "authorities," as though the mere word of an "au-

thority" can settle controversial issues. His authorities on debatable matters

of institutional development, such as the appropriate shape of military organi-

zation or the historically vexed question of citizen soldiers versus a profes-

sional army, tend to be those of the Emory Upton, professional army school.

The trouble with this method is not that the present reviewer happens to

disagree with many of the authorities, but that it falsely suggests the closing

of many debates that ought to remain open.

An instance bringing to mind an Ohio historian illustrates the problem.

Hassler says of the War of 1812: "So far as naval strategy and the building of

warships were concerned, some men at the time as well as such later authori-

ties as Alfred Thayer Mahan and Theodore Roosevelt thought that a greater

number of larger vessels, ships-of-the-line and frigates, should have been

constructed" (p. 80). But what of the cogent arguments of another authority,

Professor Harry L. Coles of Ohio State University? In his book The War of

1812 (1965), Coles suggests that it would have been better to take the oppo-

site course and have the navy build still more smaller vessels, on the lines of

the privateers, while trying to bring some coordination to a commerce raiding

that was hurting the British more than anything else of which the United

States was capable at sea, but which was limited by the helter-skelter nature