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Combined Operations: A Global History of Amphibious and Airborne Warfare By Jeremy Black Washington, DC: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017 247 pages $89.00
A few decades ago, when I was in graduate school, one of my professors, a distinguished scholar of military history, acidly observed about Jeremy Black, "As historians we all go through multiple iterations of each new work . . . but Jeremy is the only one who publishes each draft as a separate book." At the time Black had, perhaps, a "mere" 40-plus titles to his credit. Today that number is more than 100, with twenty of them appearing in just the past five years. This is an incredible pace in any field; but for an academic historian, it is essentially unmatched. Yet such efforts do come with a cost. Usually that is in accuracy, though not in this one, nor to be fair, in most of his works. True, in Combined Operations Black does make a few, niggling, and I would assess, excusable errors. It happens. But they are minor, and only specialists will pick up on them. No, here the problem, if one is to call it such, is that for all intents and purposes this book lacks a thesis.
Now that does not necessarily mean that the work is...