Every battle is different. Each takes place in a different context - the war, the campaign, the weapons. However, battles across the centuries, and the continents, have a good deal in common, whether fought with sticks and stones or advanced technology. Fighting is, after all, an intensely human affair; human nature doesn't change . . . So why were battles fought as they were? What gave them their shape? Why did they go as they did: victory for one side, defeat for the other? In The Shape of Battle, one of our most distinguished military historians tells the story of six defining feats of arms, the war and campaign in which they occured, and the factors that determined their precise form and course. They are British battles, but three were fought with allies. First, Hastings. Everyone knows the date, but not, perhaps, the remarkable strategic background. Then Towton (1461), in the Wars of the Roses, the bloodiest battle in English history. Third is Waterloo - more written about in English than any other feat of arms, but rarely in its true context as the culminating battle of the longest war in modern times, and of its antagonists' (Wellington, Napoleon, Blücher) military careers. Then D-Day, a battle in itself within a larger operation ('Overlord'), and the longest-planned and most complex offensive battle in history. Fifth is the little known Battle of the Imjin River (1951) during the Korean War, the British Army's last large-scale defensive battle. Finally, a battle that is yet to receive the official distinction of being one: Operation Panther's Claw, in Afghanistan, 2009. It was an offensive conducted over six weeks with all the trappings of 21st-century warfare yet whose shape and face at times resembled the Middle Ages. The Shape of Battle doesn't try to argue a case. It lets the narratives speak for themselves.
