Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze, 1851 (public domain image)

(3) AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY & CIVIL WAR (1775-1783 & 1861-1865)

That’s right – two wars for the price of one in this special mention, the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) and the American Civil War (1861-1865). Also two wars that could be described as the commencement of modern history – and certainly of the predominant superpower of modern history, the United States.

These two wars earn their special entry mention for a number of reasons – firstly as representative of those categories of war that deserve (and will get) their own top ten (and special mentions), revolutions and civil wars.

Of course, those two categories tend to be overlapping, as revolutions tend to evolve (or devolve) into civil wars – that is, if they don’t start out that way. For that matter, we often forget the American revolution was itself a civil war between British subjects – loyalists and revolutionaries.

And the American Civil War has also been seen as the unfinished business of the American Revolutionary War, with the victor of the American Revolution effectively as the South (or what Gore Vidal called the Virginian junta). Indeed, some have seen both as part of series of Anglo-American civil wars back to the English civil war. Not to mention the American Revolutionary War’s loose sequel, the War of 1812.

However, both are more than representative – each earn top entry in those categories. In large part that’s due to their iconic predominance in American history and therefore in the American popular culture that is to a large extent global popular culture.

But more so because I categorize the American Revolution as the best revolution – firstly, because it succeeded, and secondly that it did not collapse into despotism like other revolutions. Pro tip – revolutions are best when they are limited. The more radical the revolution’s goals – the more it seeks to overturn and upend – the more likely it is to fail, or worse, succeed as despotism. Also – shout-out to the American Revolution’s good fortune in its quality of leadership, particularly Washington (with his only rival in popular American reverence being its Civil War president Lincoln).

Secondly, these two wars also earn their special mention in another category of wars that will get their own Top 10 – American wars. Although in that case I do cheekily profess to rank them by their art of war – and the American Revolutionary War ranks up there with the best American wars in art of war.

In large part, that is because it is almost unique among American wars as the Americans fought it as underdogs, against the largest and most powerful maritime empire in history (of course, that is, apart from their own subsequent modern maritime empire)

And they won it through the tried and true art of war for states weaker than their adversaries (as well as Americans generally in their bigger wars) – having others do the fighting for you. In particular, the French – but also the Spanish and Dutch in what was effectively a world war against Britain.

Not so much the American Civil War of course, which was fought entirely between themselves without foreign allies or intervention – and remains, not coincidentally, the American war with the highest American casualties.

Thirdly and finally, these two wars earn their special mention for their own significant impact in history, military or otherwise.

The American Revolution looms larger here, inspiring as it did the Haitian and Latin American revolutions. And it not only inspired the French revolution, but directly led to it as the French monarchy had bankrupted itself fighting the American revolution – literally two revolutions for the price of one.

The American Revolution also not only saw the United States gain independence from the British maritime empire, but ultimately supplanting it as world power, fuelled by their territorial expansion across the continent that also originated with the American Revolution.

And perhaps Europeans – particularly Germans, who were unified under Bismarck at about the same time – might have paid more attention to the American Civil War as more indicative of the attrition, industrial mobilization and general slog-fest of modern warfare, as opposed to, say outliers like the Franco-Prussian War.

Lest we do too much cheerleading for the American revolution, let’s remember its losers, apart from the British (as well as French and Spanish) monarchy. British loyalists – many of whom fled to Canada or elsewhere. Those native Americans allied with the British or who otherwise sought to thwart the growing United States. And of course slaves and women, as the new American republic deprived both of liberty or representation, uncannily echoing classical Athenian democracy.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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Collage of images from the most iconic front of the war – from Wikipedia “Western Front (First World War”) under licence https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

(2) FIRST WORLD WAR (1914-1918)

Before it was known as the First World War, it was the Great War – “the biggest, bloodiest, most expensive, most disruptive, most damaging and most traumatizing war the world had ever seen up to that point”.

It also tends to be seen in almost entirely negative terms, as one of the most unpopular and pointless wars in history, particularly when compared to its successor.

In the words of the Encyclopedia of Fantasy, “both World Wars were tragic, but World War I was remembered as an unmitigated tragedy, a grinding apocalyptic process whose outcome was always foreseeable, even though some of the details (like the USA’s entry into the conflict) might have been unexpected at the time”.

“World War II, on the other hand, has been remembered as a melodrama, full of strange and uncanny ups and downs, with terrifying new weapons galore, feats of derring-do on a daily basis, and protagonists who were not only monsters in real life but also, in fictional terms, highly effective icons of villainy”.

It does not help that the First World War was hailed at one point as “the war to end all wars” – an epithet doomed to fail and be replaced by the jaded cynicism that has seen the international agreement that brought it to an end dubbed as “the peace to end all peace”.

A slur for which, as a Treaty of Versailles fan, I will not stand! Well, perhaps fan is overstating it, but I do think the Treaty of Versailles is unjustly maligned, a topic worthy of its own top ten. To put it simply, the Treaty of Versailles was not that bad – while Germany should have spent a lot more time sucking it up and a lot less time bitching about it.

Much the same goes for the First World War itself, particularly in comparison to the Second World War – albeit the former is not so much unjustly maligned, as it earns much of its claim to futility and pointlessness. And much of that is of course the Western Front, the relentless slogging match that remained largely static despite millions of casualties.

Even that, however, is somewhat unfair to the Western Front, which finally showed some dynamism in 1918, although one might observe that took long enough.

More fundamentally, it is the Western Front that provides the enduring imagery of the war, and for that matter of modern war itself, of total war and trench warfare. Its battles, as costly and futile as they were, still read like a roll call of modern military history – with perhaps Verdun and the Somme as the most definitive. Not to mention much of the definitive technology of modern war had its debut or development in the Western Front – notably tanks and aircraft.

There is also the cultural impact of the Western Front – not least on modern literary fantasy (hence the Encyclopedia of Fantasy entry), notably through J.R.R. Tolkien. Such is the cultural impact that it might be summed up by the title of Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory.

And speaking of modern memory, it is the First World War that looms larger in national commemorations honoring the day of its armistice – not to mention, nations such as Australia, for whom their national identity was essentially shaped in battle, even in defeat, during the war at Gallipoli, commemorated by Anzac Day.

The static stalemate of the Western Front obscures the war’s more dynamic nature elsewhere – on the Eastern Front (including the Russian Revolution), in the Balkans, in the Middle East (including the Arab Revolt), at sea, in the air, and my favorite as well as the most impressive military achievement through the entire war, the German guerilla warfare led by von Lettow-Vorbeck in Africa.

Arguably, the Germans fought better in the First World War than they did in the Second, despite succeeding in 1940 where they had failed in 1914 – while the Americans also arguably waged a better war, despite failing to do what they should have done in the peace after the First what they did after the Second. Japan and Italy also chose the better side in the First than in the Second, although that might be attributed more to failures in the interwar years.

But I stand by the First World War being unfairly contrasted with the Second World War – usually in terms of the comparison of casualty rates, with the former seen as pointlessly higher without the greater mobility or movement of the latter to show for it.

Firstly, that is not quite true. In blunt terms, the Western Front was just as static for most of the Second World War – it’s just that the trench was bigger, in the form of the English Channel. And also that the Western allies effectively outsourced their casualties to the Eastern Front, where casualty rates could be very high indeed. Even on the Western front from Normany onwards, casualty rates at the sharp end could also be high enough to compare to the First World War.

And in the air for that matter – it’s ironic that Bomber Harris saw the bombing campaign as a way of avoiding the high casualty rates of the Western Front in the First World War, only for the allies to replicate those rates during the bombing campaign.

Secondly, this comparison belies that, if anything, it was the Second World War that was anomalous, while the First World War was more truly characteristic of twentieth century wars as static wars of attrition – as reflected by my favorite historian, H.P. Willmott, when he quipped, seemingly as a paradox, that WW2 might be regarded as the last war of the nineteenth century and WW1 as the first war of the twentieth century. Partly this is that for a brief shining moment, the technology and technique of offensive mobility won out over defensive firepower, but as Willmott observed, it started swinging back as defensive firepower rebounded from 1942 onwards.

The Encyclopedia of Fantasy continues that “despite the attempts of propagandists on both sides, no wholly evil figure emerges from World War I to occupy the world’s imagination, no one of a viciousness so unmitigated that it seems almost supernatural; Hitler, on the other hand, has all the lineaments of a Dark Lord, and the Reich he hoped to found was a parody of the true Land”.

But it’s the Germans as bad guys – I’m a fan of the Fischer thesis.

RATING: 5 STARS*****
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