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Delbruck in his lecture to English students focuses on his methods in
analyzing military events described in contemporary texts such as Herodotus for
the battle of Marathon and Polybius and others for Roman battles such as
Cannae. Considering the interests of his audience, he chose also to include as
examples; the Swiss-Burgundian Wars, and the Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon
England. He was a pioneer in the re-evaluating the numbers given for the armies
in these battles and campaigns. He compared those numbers with the numbers that
are well known for modern battles and concluded that Herodotus, Caesar and most
others greatly exaggerated the numbers. He considered known facts such as the
size of battlefields, available transportation, access roads, food and other
logistics factors. His conclusions greatly disturbed many of this
contemporaries, but eventually his methods were admitted.
But in the 100 years since Delbruck studied the available sources the study of
ancient and medieval warfare, using his own methods, but using a greatly
expanded number of sources, plus application of modern methods such as
sociology and archeology, had changed the accepted conclusions about the same
battles.
The other major development in the study of military history that Delbruck
championed was the application of Clausewitz's dictum that war is a
continuation of politics. That idea was not only accepted but enshrined. But
was not widely applied in the history texts. Delbruck's analysis of the causes,
results and strategies in wars was based on the tight link between politics and
warfare.
He also developed Clausewitz's theory about 'limited and unlimited' warfare.
This, he defined as two different strategies - 'war of exhaustion' and 'war of
destruction' translated into English as 'war of attrition' and 'war of
annihilation.
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