| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Robert Pois and Philip Langer. Command Failure in War: Psychology and Leadership. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2004. Pp. xiv, 282. $29.95.
Military historians will find this book interesting, but they may heatedly disagree with some of its conclusions. It is obvious, however, that (the late) Robert Pois, a historian, and Philip Langer, a psychologist, labored long and seriously to produce this psychohistory. Their purpose is to explain why the commanders chosen lost campaigns or battles—or won with excessive carnage. Some are perennial losers (e.g. George McClellan of the American Civil War), others famous winners (e.g. Frederick the Great, whose behavior the authors try to account for in a rare defeat).	1
Often, analysts and interpreters of military history begin in ignorance of the facts, but not these two authors. They know the campaigns and have a grasp of the commanders' usual strategy and tactics, and of how they went wrong. Although they tend to be verbose, their accounts of campaigns and battles are excellent. The authors used no archival sources, and their printed ones are mostly in English. For example, they chose translations of selected writings of Frederick the Great, of the St. Helena "memoirs" of Napoleon, and of Erich von Manstein's Verlorene Siege (1955). They tend to ignore more recent secondary works, such as Dennis Showalter's Wars of Frederick the Great (1996) and all German works on Frederick. For a work of this sort, however, the bibliography seems adequate.	. . .

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