Rotem Kowner - Tsushima: Great Battles Series

The phrase great battle carries four immediate connotations. The first relates to time. The standard narrative, whether applied to Marathon or Waterloo, Salamis or Trafalgar, assumes that the events occurred on a single day, or at most over two or three days. Secondly, a battle has to be on a scale large enough not to be deemed a skirmish. Fighting may characterise war but fighting itself does not constitute a battle. If the forces involved are too small or the commitment to engage by one or both sides too slight, then what happens is not a great battle. At least one side, and possibly both, must want to fight. Third, a battle occurs in a defined, and in some cases confined, space. On land it is sometimes so geographically limited that it takes its name from an otherwise little-known geographical feature, such as Bunker Hill, or an obscure village or hamlet. At sea, its name may be more capacious but as often it gains precision by adopting the name of the nearest landfall. Lastly, a great battle implies that the consequences are commensurate with the commitment; in other words, that the result proves decisive.

The infrequency with which all these four conditions have been met helps explain why great battles have been rare. Great battles need to be infrequent or they lose their cachet. Calling some forms of combat battles may be no more than a rhetorical device, coined for effect, or, more pragmatically, to give shape to otherwise seemingly inchoate episodes. Since the nineteenth century the word battle has been applied to events that are not concentrated in time and space. Persistent fighting in all seasons and all weathers combined with technological innovation and full social and economic mobilisation to make outcomes more cumulative than singular. In the Second World War, the battle of the Atlantic was decisive, both in the economic war and in enabling the D Day landings, but it was not clearly defined in time or space. It lasted nearly four years and, although largely restricted to the North Atlantic, still embraced an expanse of sea larger than any major continent.

At sea especially, battle in a traditional sense was rarely decisive. As the British seapower theorist, Julian Corbett, observed in 1911, man lives upon the land, and so it scarcely needs saying that it is almost impossible that a war can be decided by naval action alone. The Greeks may have checked the Persians at Salamis in 480 BC but they did not topple the Persian empire. The Christian victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571 was similarly a great defensive success, which checked the Ottoman advance into the Mediterranean but not into continental Europe. On 21 October 1805 Nelson decisively defeated the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar but war with France continued for another decade. While Nelsons victory gave the Royal Navy command of the Mediterranean and secured British trade routes in the Atlantic, it did not end Napoleons freedom of manoeuvre within Europe. Just over six weeks after Trafalgar, the French emperor won possibly his greatest victory, defeating the armies of Austria and Russia at Austerlitz on 2 December 1805. However, even in land warfare decisiveness can be a relative, rather than an absolute, term. The continental alliance which he had smashed in 1805 was resuscitated in 1813. For many then and since, the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 embodies the concept of decisiveness, not least because it introduced nearly a century of comparative European peace, but its outcome too rested as much on the exhaustion of France, and of its enemies, after two decades of conflict as it did on the results of a single day on a confined battlefield, however sanguinary the fighting.