Desert Battle: Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

Battle: Comparative Perspectives, by Bruce Allen Watson. Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1995. xii + 196 pages. Select. Bibl. to p. 201. Index to p. 214. $49.95. Reviewed by Harold E. Raugh, Jr. German General Erwin Rommel, the so-called Desert Fox, fought in the Western of Egypt and Libya from 1941 to 1943 and called the war war without hatred. One of his subordinates, Major General Johann von Ravenstein, believed it to be gentleman's war. Men in the armies, noted one British military historian, could concentrate on the purely military aspect of warfare: the conflict remained largely divorced from those political or ideological influences which polluted the campaigns in Russia or in Europe.' Even though leading practitioners and proponents of warfare may consider it war without hatred or gentleman's war, warfare in the is not sanitized, glamorous, or romantic. heat and aridity of the are enervating and can kill the unwary or unprepared. does not provide any means of sustainment or logistical support. Sand penetrates even the smallest opening in clothes, equipment and weapons. Indeed, one of the main purposes of this book, according to author Bruce Allen Watson, is to throw down the historical gauntlet before those who think battle a great romance (p. ix). author, Professor Emeritus of Art History at Diablo Valley College, intends to accomplish this by chronicling six desert military campaigns. book begins with a frequently errorfilled (with some dozen factual and spelling errors in less than that many pages) narrative and assessment of Rommel's first advance into Cyrenaica, in April 1941. first chapter focuses not so much on Rommel's accomplishments, as on the creation of the Rommel legend and its arguably dominant influence on contemporary perceptions of warfare. A chapter describing the physical characteristics of regions follows. Napoleon's 1798-99 Egyptian campaign, and the resultant privations of the ill-prepared French force unfamiliar with a environment, is the first military operation described. This chapter establishes a pattern for those that follow, containing much irrelevant and extraneous material and gratuitous paragraphs of secondary-source information. British 1850-52 campaign on the northwest frontier of India is narrated next, but is of little relevance to the book's purported theme, since it was fought mainly on mountainous terrain. It is followed by the 1916-18 British campaign in Mesopotamia, and the first British offensive in the Western Desert, Operation Compass, 1940-41. author then analyzes the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, another odd choice; the 1956 Arab-Israeli War-the first 100-hour war-would have provided a much more viable comparative analysis. penultimate chapter of the book covers the 1991 Gulf War. This permits the author to intensify his seemingly anti-American rhetoric that began on p. 25 with, within the context of European imperialism, The United States, not to be left out, expanded into the southwest deserts, where any dead Indian was a good one. …