While the library shelves groan under the weight of tales of glorious victories, well-written accounts of grand withdrawals, skillful and otherwise, are hard to find. For that reason alone, serious students of military history will welcome the publication of Armies in Retreat: Chaos, Cohesion, and Consequences. Better yet, they will benefit greatly from the fact that the lion’s share of the chapters in this anthology tell stories that, in all likelihood, will be entirely new to them.
Some chapters are new because they deal with events, such as the Spanish Civil War and the two-sided invasion of Poland, that have received little attention from Anglophone historians. In others, novelty is a function of scale. That is, many of the chapters deal less with “armies in retreat” than the retrograde operations of army corps and divisions.
The value of these accounts is such that, in the months to come, Tactical Notebook will be publishing orders-of-battle, maps, commentary, and illustrations that complement some of the chapters in this very fine book.
Disclaimer: I am proud to count the editors of Armies in Retreat, Walker Mills and Timothy G. Heck, as well as the authors of two of the chapters, Charles Niemeyer and Eric Sibul, among my friends. I also provided editorial advice to the author of a third chapter.
Is there a way to easily get a print copy of this book? Obviously there's the PDF, but ebook reading knocks me out faster than a monotone lecturer who reads their notes verbatim.