The most recommended military history books

I learned of this book reading The Peacemaker’s Code: Malhotra’s novel includes some of the peacekeeping concepts from The Causes of War. 

Blainey’s main idea is that a major factor in war is a country being very optimistic about their chances of winning a war. And the problem there is that people often have distorted, overly optimistic ideas about their own abilities. They may not understand how much pain they and the people they care about might really be in for. Optimism can be deadly. 

Blainey’s book is also great for learning about world history. And Blainey is frequently very funny: if every history book was this entertaining, you’d have a lot more people into history.  

Henry Goulding was commander of the WW2 Special Boat Service. There is a dark, incomplete story here. The real drama is hidden between the lines and yet to be proven. Henry Goulding was a friend of Churchill, accomplished spy, fiercely patriotic, yet he did something out of character when he hid a briefcase packed with top-secret documents in his attic. He was summoned to a hospital in Scotland, despite being fit and healthy, escaped after a scuffle, telephoned his wife, was returned to the hospital where he died shortly after, apparently of natural causes. His medical records have never been released. I was contacted by his granddaughter, who years later found the briefcase, and asked if I might write a more detailed book tackling the mystery behind his death, a book begun by Sir Paddy Ashdown who died before completing a chapter. 

This book is currently out of print.

For a long time, studies of the Comintern focused on the political organization itself. Brigitte Studer’s work focuses on developing a cultural history of the organization, focusing on what she calls the “Cominternians,” the various communists who worked in the apparatus. Here, she uses a variety of lenses, from Moscow as a transnational hub, to the role of gender, to the impact of the Stalinist terror on these members. By also focusing on a wide array of experiences, she showcases the hope many Cominternians had, but also the betrayal they experienced as Stalinism changed the movement in the 1930s. Partially responsible for the transnational turn in Comintern studies, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to know more about the organization. 

I was recently asked to record a podcast for Dan Snow’s History Hit on the Praetorian Cohorts (AKA Praetorian Guard). Being away from my home library, I downloaded a Kindle edition of Guy de la Bédoyère’s book to refresh my memory. 

This is a first-rate study of the Praetorian Cohorts, from their inception to their demise. De la Bédoyère is best known as a Roman historian on Channel 4 TV’s Time Team. He knows his sources and draws extensively on them to enliven his text; he tells stories about Guard prefects and the emperors’ growing reliance on them to attain, and then hold on to, power. 

The history, organisation, and role of the Praetorian Cohorts are essential to understanding the Roman Army. This is a fine book to start that study.

I read this book when I was 16 years old. It was my first military history book and I could not put it down. Up until then I had only read military fiction: War and Peace, Ben Hur – the bigger the books the better. What captivated me most about Fuller's 2 volumes was the battles he chose to describe, starting with Salamis in 480BC, had the outcomes been different the course of world history would have changed significantly. The world in which we live in today would not be the same. This only served to intensify my interest in the detailed descriptions and at the end of each battle I'd try and imagine how history might have been impacted had the outcomes been reversed. 

I probably have referred to this work more than any other in my personal library of several thousand books. This original hardback covers more than thirteen wars in hundreds of detailed maps. Later hardback and online editions have added all major conflicts from the Korean War to the recent war in Afghanistan. Patton once said that terrain is the skeleton upon which we flesh out our plans and operations. I believe no historian can understand battles and campaigns without first understanding the terrain. These maps make it possible to see the restraints and constraints imposed by terrain and give the possibility for the trained eye to retrospectively measure the coup de oeil in their subject’s eye. All military history begins with a map and the maps begin here. 

This too often overlooked classic—written by my PhD advisor—not only explains why Clausewitz wrote his masterpiece but what he was trying to say. In doing so, Sumida breaks conventional understandings of both the great German military philosopher and the very subject of military history. Clausewitz and Sumida combine to eschew history limited to explaining outcomes by linearly tracing them back to their origins and instead advocate for narratives that reveal what the participants saw as their options in the moment and then contextualizes their choices and actions. It is this path that leads to knowledge gained through synthetic experience. Decoding Clausewitz is the single most influential work in my approach to military history.

For readers who are interested in learning how to think about international relations, strategy, security, and history.

The collection of essays discusses US foreign policy, nuclear politics, and the Cold War. My favorite is Trachtenberg’s critical reassessment of the origins of the First World War, a destructive conflict no one wanted to happen but still walked into.

I always assign this book to my students.

The author presents a reasoned rational explanation of historical events: Agents act rationally from self-interest. History makes sense.

As I read the book, I was challenged to ask: how rational is human behavior? What does rationality mean in a world that we hardly understand because it is fraught with uncertainty?

Uncertainty and surprise are important in history: What will be the next revolutionary invention? Who will be the next charismatic leader? What new ideology will sweep away conventions? Does history really make sense? Can we really make rational decisions when we face deep uncertainty about the world?

Wick Murray is one of America’s greatest military historians and Kevin Woods was the leader of the team sent by the U.S. government to exploit the documents and taped conversations captured by U.S. forces in Iraq after 2003. Murray was a key member of that team and they also interviewed many former Iraqi generals.  Finally, they also managed to unearth some Iranian accounts of the war—some from the Iraqi intelligence archives. Not surprisingly, this is a terrific account of the war, one that brings in all kinds of new material, especially from the Iraqi side. Their narrative description hits all of the key points of a very long, complex conflict, their insights and analysis are spot on, and the addition of the new material from the Iraqi side makes this the definitive work on the subject at least until comparable materials come to light from the Iranian side.