The German war economy oscillated uneasily between these two models mastering neither

The German war economy oscillated uneasily between these two models, mastering neither. Writing on air warfare, Overy shows how the Allies used tactical airpower to wreck Hitler’s tanks at Normandy, while the bombing campaign disrupted communications, diverted fighters and anti-aircraft crews, and killed or massively inconvenienced German or Japanese civilians.In a less operational mode, Mark Roseman, one of the few contributors to address the impact of war on society, heretically wonders whether two world wars made much of a difference in terms of real social change, as distinct from the perception of it, a theme which used to exercise historians of Nazi Germany. The contours of the welfare state were visible before 1914; the interwar Depression, not war, spurred Keynes-style interventionism. War damage and population losses were rapidly reversed; American and Soviet hegemony resolved many of the factors that made for interwar economic instability. This substitution of economic for sociological determinism will seem novel to East European readers ill-versed in the postmodernistic interplay of memory and perception.Philip Towle, Townshend and Martin van Creveld are useful guides to, respectively, the Cold War, “people’s wars”, and what might be in store in the next century. Towle’s chapter on the Cold War is striking for its paradoxes.

Weapons systems became so destructive that politicians were progressively loath to use them: during the Korean War, Truman contemplated using the Bomb against the Chinese, and then backed off on the grounds that it would not be tactically effective, and would weaken its overall deterrent value.According to Creveld’s chapter on “Postmodern War”, the nuclear reductio ad absurdum in turn contributed to the development of precision and smart weaponry, bombs and missiles used to destroy command centres, bridges, water-pumping or electrical grid systems, as demonstrated in the Gulf War. The military was thoughtful enough to provide video footage giving the missile’s-eye view, just to reassure everyone that they were not massacring civilians.But, as these three contributors constantly stress, high-tech weaponry is useless in wars of insurgency. Despite Agent Orange or mines disguised as toys, the Americans and Russians left Vietnam and Afghanistan with little to show for it, except one and a half million American veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Russians with major heroin problems. Israeli blitzkrieg tactics juddered to a halt amid the complexities of Lebanon. Both Creveld and Townshend are sceptical of the value of conventional high-tech armies in the low-intensity ethnic or religious struggles, or terrorist campaigns, that seem to be the way things are going.

What use are tanks or Cruise missiles against car-bombers in Beirut or the Bogside, especially when the former are willing to die smiling in the process?But here, the military-history approach, fascinated with things that go bang, begins to reveal its limitations. Both NATO and the UN conspicuously failed to mitigate the atrocities committed by the Serbs in former Yugoslavia, because of political irresolution rather than any failure on the part of the military. The Oxford international-relations specialist Adam Roberts, writing on the containment or prevention of war, is a much more convincing guide to the rules of the current complex game than historians over-tantalised by military hardware. The future may hold no more than the ugly Peninsular scenes depicted by Goya in his “Disasters of War” series, but Professor Roberts’s sanguine account of how we are slowly learning to avoid, contain and limit war should not be discounted. The International Tribunal in the Hague may not raise the dead of Bosnia, but it is a step in the right direction.Inevitably, a book such as this cannot cover everything. It is weak on the triangular conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Second World War, where it was not uncommon for partisans to be fighting the Nazis, Soviets and each other simultaneously, or for non-Russian nationalities to be better represented in the Wehrmacht than the Red Army. There is nothing about how fighting is mediated to the domestic public by war correspondents, a matter of some relevance now that satellite dishes can show mortar shells exploding at a Bosnian funeral or Cruise missiles turning at the traffic lights in Baghdad.

There is nothing on the role of policemen, rather than soldiers, in containing terrorism. And we have no sense of how cheap Schwarzenegger or Stallone videos may be “informing” the minds of adolescent boys with Kalashnikovs the world over. In a sense, we needed more on how societies have changed.The copious illustrations are also not without problems. We see sturdy bastions at Berwick-on-Tweed; delicate frigates puffing smoke at Porto Bello; stringy biplanes duelling over the Somme; and Harriers whooshing off carrier decks in the Falklands, for all the world like a trade advertisement.