How to Lose a Battle by Bill Fawcett (ed.) is a collection of battles throughout history that went awry. History is a subject that I enjoy so this book held a real fascination for me. That is, until I started reading it. Sure the subject matter is interesting, but these are stories that are poorly told.
Strengths and weaknesses
Some of the battles are laid out in an interesting and understandable fashion. There were quite a few battles that were unknown to me. I look forward to investigating these further. (That’s about all I can say – the only thing that kept me turning the pages was the hope that the next chapter would be better than the last.)
This book had quite a few weaknesses. There was some real concern that authors might not have all their facts straight. You have the Romans being defeated at Carrhae (p 29) only to retreat to Carrhae (p 32). There are tremendous gaps in the story like the capture of the French king at the battle of Agincourt (p 55). Sometimes the main events are only breezed over like the thousands of lives that were lost at Okinawa (p 300). None of the authors made any references to any other works and no information was given about any of the other authors.
Even if these accounts are credible, the book still left much to be desired. After every battle, there was some sort of analysis. This analysis was either way too general or it didn’t fit with the details that the author presented. Some authors used exaggeration to the point of being annoying – the Charge of the Light Brigade only lost 139 men but it was “the most notoriously futile and costly cavalry charge in British history.” (p 98) They misspelled the word “could” by spelling it “couild.” With all the spell-checkers we have today?!? I am more sympathetic to “cold” or “cloud” but not couild (p 300).
This sort of nit-picking could go on, but the long and short of it is – don’t buy this book. The best thing to do would be to go to your library and xerox off the table of contents. Take your list of 38 battles and look them up on wikipedia or encyclopedia.ftd.com.
