- Wood, C. E.
Mud: A Military History.
Washington: Potomac Books, 2006.
ISBN 978-1-59797-003-7.
-
Military historians from antiquity to the present day have examined
innumerable aspects of human conflict in painstaking detail: strategy,
tactics, morale, terrain, command structures, training of troops,
logistics, mobility, weapons, armour, intelligence both before
the battle and after the enemy is engaged, and a multitude of other
factors which determine the outcome of the engagement. If you step
back from the war college or general staff view from above and ask
the actual combatants in land warfare, from privates to flag rank,
what they often recall as dominating their contemporary memories, it
will often be none of these things, but rather mud. This
is the subject of this slim (190 page) but extensively researched
and documented book.
When large numbers of men, equipment, and horses (or, in the modern era,
mechanised vehicles) traverse terrain, unless it is totally dry,
it is likely to be stirred up into a glutinous mix of soil and
water: mud. The military mind cannot resist classifying things, and
here the author draws the distinction between Type I mud, which is
“bottomless” (well, not really, of course, but effectively
so since it is deep enough to mire and swallow up any military
force which attempts to cross it), Type IIa, which is dominated by
liquid and can actually serve to clean hardware which passes through it
but may make it impossible to dig trenches or build fortifications,
and Type IIb, which is sticky and can immobilise and render ineffective
everything from an infantryman's entrenching tool to a main battle tank.
The book illustrates the impact of mud on land warfare, examining its
effects on engineering works such as building roads and
fortifications, morale of troops, health, and wear and tear and
reliability of equipment. Permanent mud (as exists in marshes and
other wetlands), seasonal mud (monsoons and the horrific autumn rain
and spring thaw mud in Russia which brought both Napoleon and Hitler's
armies to a standstill), and random mud (where a downpour halts an
advance as effectively as enemy action) each merit their own
chapters.
Technical discussions of the composition and behaviour of mud and
its effects upon soldiers and military equipment are illustrated
by abundant examples from conflicts from antiquity to the most recent
war in Iraq. Most examples date from the era of mechanised warfare,
but the reader will rapidly appreciate that the reality of mud to
the infantryman has changed little since the time of Thucydides.
In Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
has one of his characters asked to solve one of the greatest problems
facing Marines in combat: mud. The solution,
ice-nine,
is fantasy, but generations of Marines would probably agree upon
the primacy of the problem. Finally the importance of mud in
military affairs gets its due in this book. One hopes military planners will
not ignore it, as so many of their predecessors have with disastrous
consequences.
September 2015 