Battling the Elements by Harold A. Winters, Johns Hopkins Press, £30,
GEOLOGY wins battles. This is obvious in ancient history: castles have held
the high ground for thousands of years. It may lose them too. As I write, I
imagine NATO planners discovering the nature and origins of Karst limestone
terrain in and around Kosovo—and that they don’t like it one bit.
Consider, too, that if the North Atlantic had opened differently 180 million
years ago, the hills that dictated the conduct of the 1863 battle of Gettysburg
in the American Civil War would have been different—and so might the
United States of America.
Battling the Elements puts a novel slant on familiar facts. Picture
a low-lying, poorly drained region, with clay soils eroding from soft, gently
dipping rocks below. The few ridges and hills rise perhaps 5 or 10 metres, the
weather tends to be damp, and the water table is as little as a metre below
ground. This is Flanders and a more unpromising setting for trench warfare can
scarely be imagined.
Harold Winters surveys a range of battles in detail, focusing on the way in
which weather or terrain made a difference. The book is packed with maps,
diagrams and photographs, showing the battlefield positions superimposed on
geology, topography or vegetation. In part it is an overview of military
tactics, stressing how success depends on understanding as much as possible
about the project in hand—be it supplying water or getting a strong
position for battle.
There seems little point in wondering how the First World War would have been
different had Flanders been better drained. But what if, 25 years later, the
weather in the English Channel had not been unusually good for the week in early
summer 1940 when the British Expeditionary Force was stranded at Dunkirk?