China: A Concise History Book

Any student of history or fan of science-fiction has wondered about the element of chance and chaos in making history. What unlikely series of events linked together, brought us to the present moment. How could things have gone differently? The old Great Man school of history says that bold plans and great leaders make the times. Marxists say that history is a struggle of class warfare and material forces. But what if both of these theories are wrong? What if history were driven by blind chance? What if instead of great men, history was full of idiots and blusterers?

That would be an interesting book. Sadly, it is not this one. Instead, The Hinge Factor is veteran war journalist Erik Durschmied taking us on a tour of consequential battles in history, starting with the Trojan Horse, jumping the entire ancient world to Hattin in 1187, and then wandering up to Desert Storm, with a slight anglophile bias. Durschmied is a solid enough writer, and he livens up his history with plenty of close personal details. It's fine reading for say, dads at the beach with a couple of beers, though as a snob with letters after my name, I wonder what is strictly sourced, what is common mythos (the St. Crispin Day speech is moving, but it is Shakespeare's version for centuries later, and may bear about as much relationship to the actual events as Hamilton does to the American Revolution), and what is created whole cloth.

Fine enough, but the chapter on the Tet offensive was is to knock this down to a two star review, which is especially galling because Durschmied actually is a first-hand expert on the Vietnam War. He was a reporter in country for ten years, and as a Canadian reporter, also has a unique perspective on the Communist side, because he covered the 1977 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia. His inability to pick a coherent story between Westmoreland's failure to anticipate Tet, the bloody battle of Hue, the infamous photo of General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan summarily executing Nguyễn Văn Lém, and the destruction of the Viet Cong as a military force is just... staggering.

If you're in the mood for a book based around the title, I heartily recommend On the Psychology of Military Incompetence by Norman F. Dixon. Now that is how stupidity has influenced military history.