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Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August appeared to glowing reviews in the popular press in February 1962. Orville Prescott, writing in the New York Times on February 5, declares it "a splendid and glittering performance, one of the finest works of history written in recent years"; she writes "elegant and polished" prose that reflects "a sardonic sense of humor." And Tuchman, Prescott continues, concentrates "on what people said, did and felt. Her pages are full of apt quotations and of hundreds of dramatic scenes and episodes." The work, he concludes, "is a fine demonstration that with sufficient art rather specialized history can be raised to the level of literature."
The reading public agreed with Prescott. The book stayed on the bestseller list for more than forty weeks. In 1963 it won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. President John Kennedy reportedly read The Guns of August before the Cuban missile crisis later in 1962. It was said that he found in Tuchman's admonitions to be skeptical about military plans the reasons behind his own sharp questioning of the military plans offered to him that October-plans that turned out to be exceptionally suspect. And, in the years since, the work has been assigned to generations of students on courses that deal with the First World War and with questions of grand strategy.
In contrast to the popular acclaim received by the book, professional historians have from the start been equally critical of it. Some, such as the reviewer in the Journal of Modern History (March 1963), praised its prose style but found the account based "only partially" on the best available sources and castigated its flagrantly "one-sided treatment of imperial Germany." Another reviewer, in Military Affairs (autumn 1962), pronounced that the "serious military scholar, however, will find nothing here that is new either in facts or interpretations and will be struck by the author's significant omissions." The writer of this review, who read The Guns of August when it first appeared and cited it three times in a major study, has always regarded the effort as seriously flawed.
The republication of this influential popular study offers this reviewer an opportunity to explain the widely discordant reception that the book received when it first appeared. The comments that...