Abel on Walsh, 'Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost'

H-War Abel on Walsh, 'Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost' Review published on Thursday, January 14, 2021 Michael Walsh. Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2020. 368 pp. $28.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-250-21708-0. Reviewed by Jonathan Abel (Command and General Staff College, Ft. Leavenworth) Published on H-War (January, 2021) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University) Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=56033 “It Doesn’t Matter ... Whether the Stories Really Happened: What Matters Is That They Are True” Michael Walsh’s Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost is a new entry into the popular history market, aimed at securing an audience interested in military history and military affairs. It relates the stories of fifteen battles, ranging from classical Greece to World War II, from the author’s perspective. These serve as case studies of the author’s thesis, which purports to be to reawaken the masculinity of the West, and of America specifically. The result is a problematic text that does little more than epitomize the pop culture history of America after 1950 and impregnate it with the author’s troublesome views. Walsh’s stated theme is to use his case studies to illustrate examples of masculinity: “this book is a testament ... to the concept of manliness itself” (p. 2). However, this waxes and wanes throughout the text. Some chapters, like the ones on Thermopylae and Roncevaux Pass, make frequent recourse to masculinity, while it is largely absent in others, like those on Masada/Warsaw and Rorke’s Drift/Khartoum. As a result, it cannot be said to be a consistent theme of the work, despite Walsh’s stated intention and the book’s cover quote from Victor Davis Hanson. Instead, Walsh’s primary theme is a variety of neo-Huntingtonianism (or, given the author’s age, perhaps simple Huntingtonianism). He posits a clash of civilizations between a civilized, Christian, individualist West and an uncivilized, Muslim, collectivist East determined to destroy it. In his introduction, Walsh admits that he has curated his case studies to include only those that support this thesis. When his examples allow, this theme is literal, as in the case of the largely Christian Habsburg defenders of Szigetvár against the Muslim Ottomans in 1566 or the Christian British forces killed at Khartoum by the Mahdi’s forces in 1885. In cases where the analogy cannot be direct, Walsh finds recourse to myth to make it so; thus the 778 Battle of Roncevaux Pass becomes a Christian-versus- Muslim fight via the later Song of Roland, and the chapter on nineteenth-century conflicts in Mexico posits a second Reconquista of the former lands of New Spain by current Mexico, echoing the Christian Reconquista of Umayyad Iberia. When the neo-Huntington thesis cannot be forced, Walsh provides surrogates like the “savage” tribes of Little Bighorn; the voracious Protestants of the 1527 Sack of Rome; or the implacable, faceless, pagan empires of Achaemenid Persia, Rome, and Nazi Citation: H-Net Reviews. Abel on Walsh, 'Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost'. H-War. 01-14-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/12840/reviews/7120127/abel-walsh-last-stands-why-men-fight-when-all-lost Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-War Germany. The result of this bifurcation is a narrative that is succinct and pointed in some passages and meandering in others. Last Stands is not a work of academic history or historiography nor does it make any pretense of being so. Therefore, it lacks the scholarly apparatus found in such works. It does not have a bibliography, and most of the footnotes are elaborations of Walsh’s points rather than citations of sourcing. As a result, Walsh’s sourcing must be gleaned from the text. He makes use of primary source documents, usually a single main source for each chapter/case study. Portions of these are printed in an appendix to the book, which begins with a non-sequitur citation from the Christian Bible. Few secondary sources appear in the work or its notes. According to the text, Walsh relies most on Edward Creasy’s Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World (1851) as his model, and indeedLast Stands could be said to be an entry into the “great battles” canon of popular military history. Walsh draws his cultural and social analysis from the works of British writer Paul Johnson, whom he references regularly. Most of the remaining referenced secondary works are either non-scholarly works or ones that are old, like Edward Gibbon’sThe Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in the late 1700s, or J. E. A. Whitman’s How Wars are Fought, from 1941. Walsh’s choices of sourcing lead to puzzling passages and conclusions throughout, as illustrated by three examples from his introductory chapter. He presents the theme of soldiers’ motivations, a common one in military history, popular and scholarly, but fails to reference the seminal work on the topic by S. L. A. Marshall, among others. Walsh uses the aforementioned work by Whitman to illustrate the immutable nature of war rather than referencing Carl von Clausewitz, the preeminent scholar of the unchanging nature of war, even to popular historians. In the same chapter, Walsh refers to the “afterlife” of a battle, citing theater critic Jonathan Miller’sSubsequent Performances (1986) and seemingly unaware of the vast, cross-disciplinary field of memory studies. Occasionally, this presents a missed opportunity; for example, Walsh contends that “no one should ‘take care’ of a man once he hits puberty and grows into what we call manhood,” an argument that might benefit from an understanding of the related views on child-rearing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (p. 15). Finally, many of Walsh’s references and footnotes are only tangentially connected to the arguments in which they are embedded, particularly the references to fiction. The result is a sporadically sourced book with little connection to any work beyond those of Creasy, Johnson, and, ultimately, Samuel Huntington. Thus, the text of Last Stands illustrates that Walsh made little effort to locate his study or arguments within historical literature, particularly historiography. Instead, beyond the few aforementioned secondary sources, he prefers to make use of works of fiction, both in print and film, to support his arguments. These range from authors like Virgil and Thomas Mann to John Ford westerns and Zach Snyder’s Thermopylae film 300 (2006). He thus appears to have wholeheartedly adopted the title of this review, drawn from the text, as his modus operandi: “it doesn’t matter ... whether the stories really happened. What matters is that they are true” (p. 105). Indeed, Walsh’s case studies appear to have been selected primarily because they almost all have such cultural productions related to them. The Siege of Szigetvár is an excellent example of this; Walsh appears to have selected it in place of a similar case study like the 1453 Fall of Constantinople because it allows him to draw a direct analogy between Szigetvár and the Syrian refugee crisis in late 2010s Europe. Worse still for an ostensible Citation: H-Net Reviews. Abel on Walsh, 'Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost'. H-War. 01-14-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/12840/reviews/7120127/abel-walsh-last-stands-why-men-fight-when-all-lost Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-War work of history, in several chapters, most notably on Thermopylae and Roncevaux, he uses these fictional narratives in place of history. Thus, Thermopylae, like300 , becomes a heroic stand of individuals against mechanistic, slave-owning Persians despite the fact that classical Greece was literally built by slaves, and Roncevaux Pass, likeThe Song of Roland, becomes a heroic fight of Christian against raving Muslim hordes despite the historical battle’s being between Franks and Basques. As a result, Last Stands is more a history of the popular memory of the battles presented, as filtered through Walsh’s own views, rather than a history of them per se. As is unfortunately the case in many works aimed at a popular audience, Walsh’s text suffers from numerous infelicities of historical analysis and fact throughout. Examples from its second chapter illuminate the issue. Page 49 finds that the “Roman civil war was fought largely in Greece” despite the various civil wars that plagued Rome throughout the first century BCE taking place across the Mediterranean, including, but certainly not predominantly, in Greece. The following page states that Muslims destroyed the Great Library at Alexandria, the “great seat of classical and early Christian learning,” despite that institution’s largely having been destroyed by the Romans in successive conflicts beginning with Julius Caesar, and one of its successors, the Serapeum, notoriously having been destroyed by Christians. Finally, page 55 argues that “never had Republican Rome fielded an army of such size [as at Cannae], nor would it; neither would Imperial Rome”; Walsh is apparently unaware of the 105 BCE Battle of Arausio, in which Republican Rome lost an army of probably over 120,000, far more than the 50,000 to 80,000 traditionally ascribed to the defeat at Cannae. While the above serves to illustrate the density of errors in a particular passage, they are found in most chapters. Walsh states that Switzerland “won independence from the Holy Roman Empire in 1499”; while Switzerland did win a degree of autonomy from imperial taxation and law in that year, it remained a part of the empire until 1648 (p.

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