Book Review - Armies in Retreat

Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences

Edited by Timothy Heck and Walker Mills

Army University Press, 2023, 436 pp

Paperback ISBN: 9781940804873

Reviewed by: Liam Kane

When should military leaders break off an engagement with their enemies? What is the difference between a retreat and a rout? What is the significance of retreat? These are the some of the questions that the contributors to Armies in Retreat seek to answer. The book’s editors, Timothy Heck and Walker Mills, were motivated to undertake this project to balance what they see as an overwhelming focus on ‘success’ or ‘victory’ in recent studies of large-scale conventional operations.^[1] Defeat and retreat are also personal subjects to the editors and many of the book’s contributors because of their connections to the war in Afghanistan. For them, the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in 2020–2021, which culminated in the chaotic airlift from Kabul airport in August 2021, was an ‘almost personal event’.^[2] In this context, Armies in Retreat may serve as a message (perhaps unintended) to the US government and military, and their allies (including Australia), that active planning for the worst possible eventualities requires humility and historical consciousness. 

The book’s 18 contributors include an admirable range of established and emerging scholars and civilian and military writers, whose biographies are usefully included at the end of the book. That only two women (Catherine Bateson and Aimée Fox) are among the contributors is disappointing and not necessarily reflective of the diverse range of scholars in the field of war studies. The book’s chapters cover substantial temporal ground—ranging from the Peloponnesian War to the Korean War and beyond—and are grouped into overarching themes: chaos, cohesion and consequences. Chapters in the chaos section focus mostly on chaotic retreats and routs, whereas those in the cohesion section deal with more orderly withdrawals. The final section (consequences) provides chapters that seek to put defeats and retreats into strategic and political context. 

This is a welcome volume, especially for educators in military academies who require quality military history pitched to their students. The book, however, is not immune from constructive critique. The first two sections blur together because retreats (successful or otherwise) usually feature examples of both chaos and cohesion. The last section is more distinct because most of its chapters pertain to non-operational matters. Nonetheless, the final section is something of a grab bag of topics, thematically speaking. Two chapters (14 and 15) focus on defeat rather than retreat; two consider cultural narratives of defeat and retreat (16 and 17); one examines civil–military relations (18); while the last considers offensive cyber operations (19). More substantial interventions by the editors, such as short section introductions, would have helped the reader to better understand the sequencing of the chapters, or at least to gain some insights into the editors’ ‘back and forth’^[3] discussions that informed decisions on the book’s themes.

The stated aim of the editors is to ‘inform leaders’^[4] about defeat and retreat. Some contributing authors offer more explicit lessons than others. A few of them let the narrative largely speak for itself, pointing to general theoretical conclusions and connections to the present. Other chapters that have a strong technical focus (such as Marcin Wilczek’s study of Polish mounted units in 1939) would have benefited from being framed more analytically to connect historical cases to wider themes. 

US Army doctrine features heavily in Armies in Retreat, which is understandable for an Army University Press publication. Most of the authors who refer to doctrine use it to establish an assumption in the manner in which one might draw on Clausewitz or another theorist. Other contributors, however, shift away from this form of analysis and instead employ test historical cases against contemporary doctrine. In his study of the failed British invasion of Holland in 1809, Jason Lancaster argues that because the operations chief architect (Lord Castlereagh) planned the operation by himself without ‘modern planning doctrine’,^[5] the undertaking was bungled. This approach does more to vindicate modern doctrine than to illuminate the intricacies and problems of British planning. 

What lessons might leaders take from Armies in Retreat? Like any other historical event, each retreat is unique, as Heck and Mills observe.^[6] However, several truisms recur across the chapters. One is that in societies in which militaries are at least nominally subject to civilian authority, the decision to carry out a strategic withdrawal occurs on a civil–military plane. In this light, the British decision to evacuate imperial forces from the Gallipoli peninsula in 1915,^[7] and the German withdrawal from the Demyansk salient on the Eastern Front in 1943,^[8] were both complicated by their political context. Indeed, British Cabinet-style policymaking and the Führer’s centralised command practices respectively presented challenges. A second observation is that well-trained forces which foster strong bonds between officers and men are more likely to fare better in withdrawals than their poorly trained and discordant counterparts. While this is true for any force in any military undertaking, it is especially true for retreats because they are characterised by a particularly volatile mixture of war’s frictions and passions. For example, the heterogeneous and ill-prepared XV International Brigade basically dissolved in the Nationalist offensive in Aragon in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War.^[9] By contrast, cohesion and professionalism among the ranks of the US 1^st Marine Division saved it in the intense 1950 Chosin Reservoir campaign during the Korean War.^[10] Finally, a retreating army is rarely alone. There is often a force (or forces) in pursuit whose experiences could fill another volume. Further, in large-scale operations conducted in densely populated areas, many civilians fleeing combat, persecution or deprivation (probably all three) will usually mingle with retreating forces. While withdrawing forces can try to deal with civilians in an ad hoc manner (as was the case in Korea in 1950 when thousands of refugees were evacuated by the US military operated railroad system^[11]), forces in retreat should be prepared for the inevitable complexities of the human terrain.

The editors of and contributors to Armies in Retreat ought to be congratulated. This volume is a timely reminder to relinquish hubris and always prepare for the worst.

About the Reviewer

Dr Liam Kane is a Lecturer in Military History and teaches at the Australian Defence College. His research focuses on Australian and United States military history during the Second World War and beyond. His work can be found in scholarly journals such as War in History and the Journal of Military History. 

Endnotes