|PKP News||November 2008, Vol. 1, Issue 2|
War and History: Comprehension and Performance.
An A Day program by Dr. Hubert van Tuyll, chair of History, Anthropology, and Philosophy. by Robert Smalley
As an introduction, he challenged everyone to consider how many wars they could name if they were given sufficient time. He asked everyone to consider whether they had ever seen a film showing a war, a war scene on television, a documentary on a war. or ever played a game based on principles of war. I am sure most of us realized we had been exposed to war more than we had thought.
Since the lecture was sponsored by Phi Kappa Phi, Dr. van Tuyll made sure he used at least one word I would need to check in the dictionary after his speech by discussing the ubiquity of war and the ubiquity of the literature of war. In case there is anyone else who is not sure of the meaning of ubiquity, Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary provides the following definition: "presence everywhere or in many places especially simultaneously." That source gives the word omnipresence as a synonym.
He mentioned the size of the one-volume Encyclopedia of Military History, discussed the amount of literature written about Napoleon and Hitler, and stated the book of Deuteronomy in the Bible has good examples of literature on war.
In his discussion of the purposes of the study of war, he had three subsections: nderstanding how it's done, nderstanding it, and avoiding it. He mentioned that numerous wars have been fought since the end of the war to end all wars (World War I).
Dr. van Tuyll then discussed the cultural angle compared to the cross cultural angle of looking at wars. Most of the literature has been written from only one perspective, but a few writers have gathered information from the various parties involved in the conflict.
After providing information on how war has been studied and some advertising of the book he and Dr. Jurgen Brauer, ASU Economics Professor in the Hull College of Business, co-authored. he concluded with the following comments:
Patton stated, "Compared to Warfare, all other forms of human endeavor are insignificant."' War is certainly frequent and wars continue. All fields of study have something useful to say about warfare and decision making in war.
For me, two stories relating to World War II were especially interesting. Prior to the Battle of Midway, many Japanese leaders divided into two teams to consider what they thought the outcome would be. The referees decided the Japanese forces would lose, but the senior office overruled the referees stating the American bombers would not be as accurate as estimated by the referees. Dr. van Tuyll stated there were plenty of errors for all, since the Americans in 1937 had conducted exercises to determine whether the Saratogo could get close enough to Pearl Harbor to attack without being detected. They were able to avoid detection several times.
One of my colleagues stated she was surprised how much she enjoyed the talk, because the subject was not of interest to her prior to attending. Thanks again Hubert for a job well done!
|Augusta State University Chapter of the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi|