Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century by Alistair Horne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Alistair Horne is one of the great authors of military history and I was intrigued by the concept of his latest book: he analyzes six major battles from the first half of the 20th century in terms of hubris. It is a somewhat provocative concept, but he makes a good case for it; certainly it was worth the effort to read the book.

The six battles that he chose, were Port Arthur/Tsushima Straits from the Russo-Japanese war, the battle of Nomohan between Japan and the USSR in 1939, the battle of Moscow in 1941, the battle of Midway, MacArthur’s campaign to secure the line of the Yalu River in Korea in 1950 and the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. there is also a discussion of the Six Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973 in the Epilogue.

As I said, he makes a good case for hubris as a deciding factor in these battles, but the narrative itself has some problems. Certainly his analysis of the battles in the first half of the book is much more detailed that those in the second half. And some of the battle narratives in the second half are badly flawed – there are numerous errors concerning dates, and the narrative he presents of the battle of Midway has serious issues. Even in the Epilogue, the Straits of Tiran are called the Straits of Tehran.

These basic factual errors do not really detract from Horne’s thesis of the importance of hubris, but they are very distracting to say the least. For this reason I find it difficult to recommend this book. It has a novel concept which is well supported but the narrative in the second half of the book does contain serious flaws.