Rating: 3 out of 5
I’m generally a bigger fan of Mr Wolmar then this time around. Somehow I found the level of detail not good enough, with entire wars and theatres of other wars not even mentioned while the focus was on the Western front of the First World War. This is not surprising from a British author, but I was looking for more.
The coverage of the Crimean War is good, though focussed on the Crimean Peninsula. It would have been very interesting to see and hear if the British incursions into the Baltic Sea were answered by Russian railway action in the same place. The American Civil War chapter was better and perhaps the brevity here was what was missing below in some of the other sections, such as the one on the First World War.
I found it odd the author referred—multiple times—to the Russo-Japanese War as “obscure” given the extensive literature very readily available on this and the general acceptance that it was a harbinger of what was to come in 1914. It seems also that he was still able to find some information on it, though perhaps the naval adventures in the North Sea could have been left unmentioned in this case to focus solely on the railways.
Beyond this, Mr Wolmar also covers some Russo-Turkish actions, the Second World War, and the Korean War. What are missing are in depth coverages on the Russian Civil War and the independence wars in the aftermath of the First World War—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Finland—where there was very extensive use of railways and armoured trains. There’s also no mention of the First World War in Africa, where trains may have been the defining factor (but I don’t know much about this so I’m not sure myself, but at least a mention could have been made). There’s also no description of any conflicts in South America.
Overall, I enjoyed this book, but as a general summary of the topic, it’s somewhat lacking.
