Sublime

The campaign also transformed the Middle East, converting it into what the secretary of state called a “tremendous supply base” for the Allies. Factories in Palestine made batteries, those in Iran made antifreeze, and canning plants in Egypt produced rations for the troops. The northern half of Africa, which had been a virtual terra incognita for t

An important geographical distinction also operated. When Poland was attacked, in 1939, the Führer made a point of ordering his generals to act with ‘the harshest cruelty’. In effect he was inviting the Wehrmacht to ignore the conventions of civilized warfare when fighting in the East. He repeated the injunction in 1941 before the attacks on Yugosl

He, therefore, used space, in war, to restore the Union. He ignored orthodoxies, pored over maps, and calculated capacities. These showed Northern strengths to be the exterior lines along which new technologies—telegraphs, railroads, industrially produced weaponry—could combine with new thinking to allow mobility and concentrated force. All Lincoln

Lloyd George frequently emphasized to me in conversation that one feature that distinguished a first-rate political leader from a second-rate politician is that the former was always careful to avoid making any definite statement that could be subsequently refuted, as he was likely to be caught out in the long run.

both cases, psychology proved critical. Napoleon’s delusion was to believe in military strategy and underestimate the role of morale; his generals failed to appreciate that Russian citizens battling for their lives on their home soil had far greater incentive to fight than did a poilu from Paris yearning for the Champs Elysées. The LTCM strategists

Leavenworth’s “applicatory method” drew heavily upon military history to analyze the quandaries faced by an army’s high command and to devise solutions under rapidly changing conditions. Students learned, through map exercises, to plan and control the movement of troops from afar.

Conner loaned Eisenhower three works of historical fiction—The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (of Sherlock Holmes fame), The Long Roll by Mary Johnston (granddaughter of Confederate General Joseph Johnston), and The Crisis by American author Winston Churchill (no relation to the more famous Briton of the same name.)

it is worth thinking of a figure like Arthur in terms of the sort of lordship he might have enjoyed. In the Historia Brittonum he is explicitly not a king but a leader in war, fighting alongside kings or on their behalf. Conspicuously, while Gildas’s tyrants and the piratical warlords of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Irish Annalsp are territorial l