The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History

This is actually a fun book to read. It contains 17 short essays, none much longer than 20 pages, on military battles and the chance events that contributed to the final outcomes.

The essays cover a range of wars starting with the Trojan war and ending with the Gulf War of 1991. I especially enjoyed reading about how the heavy armor of the French knights contributed to their fall at Agincourt against Henry V. The description of Waterloo was well done, where maneuvers were traded tactically back and forth for advantage between the French and the English and Prussian troops. General McClellan comes off looking terrible in the essay on Antietam but this is nothing compared to the incompetence of the English officers at the battle of Balaclava where the famous Light Brigade was destroyed by Russian forces.

The essays are short but they lack depth. They are popular introductions rather than scholarly reference products. You should read this book for fun, but you should read more about each battle if you are really interested in the historic facts. The hinge factors are relatively weak. These battles were won or lost based on a multifactored interaction of influences. Weather and accidents no doubt to sway events to some extent but Durschmeid may put too much emphasis on mud's influence on warfare and the outcome of massive battles. Weather is a favorite hinge factor in these chapters, yet weather impacts both sides of a battle. It is the adaptation of leadership to the weather conditions that tends to make the difference.

A friend of mine told me about the premise of this book: that the outcome of many (even important) battles throughout history has been defined not by the military brilliance of the winners, but by the human weakness of the losers or just by luck.

I was intrigued by it, and read it (that is to say, I am not an specialist versed on military or history readings - you can see that if you click on my "other reviews").

I will be brief. What I liked about this book was:

- Nice set of chronologically ordered events, starting from Troy and finishing with the fall of the Berlin wall.

- The premise seems to be correct in most of the examples provided: yes, human beings are weak and, well, human. So, many battles were lost by arrogance, by abrupt changes in weather conditions, by miscommunication, etc.

The issues that bothered me whilst reading it were:

- Convoluted story-telling. The description of some battles was very difficult to follow. Sometimes I read them once, twice, could not fully understand the movements of the players, and at the end, just quit and kept going, following the major points but missing in some of the details that Mr. Durschmeid failed (imho) to convey appropriately.

- Horrible use of footnotes. I won't get into details here, but let's just say it's not clear to me who was thinking what about the footnotes in this book. Some are iterative, some could be in the text, some are inocuous references, some are translations and some are pretty much incomprehensible.

- Translations: in many instances Durschmeid failed to translate quotes from French or German military officers. So, his point was completely lost.

- Maps: yes, it is very convenient to use maps to help the readers understand the movement of troops in the battles; but, no, it is not wise to use a poorly designed and schematized map for each battle. Their value was many times diminished.

The four issues above seem like details, but their comeuppance again and again in this book make me feel as if was written in haste. I don't understand what was the rush, but clearly someone could have helped Mr. Durschmeid in making it more intelligible, more sharp, more thorough.

Read this if you're curious about the role of stupidity in warfare. It opens your eyes. In some occassions you may even laugh at what happened.

But, unless you're a scholar, or have the patience to read and re-read some paragraphs, you might feel dissappointed by the lack of quality in the book's form (not its content, which is fine).

The Hinge Factor relates some important events in history as entertaining anecdotes. The book does live up to it's subtitle "How chance and stupidity have changed history". Each of the anecdotes shows how chance or someone's stupid decision changed the outcome of an important historical event. A number of unrelated historical events were chosen as examples.
That is actually the biggest problem with the book. While each example stands on its own, there is no attempt to draw the piece together into a coherent whole. No lessons are drawn. The book comes to no conclusion. Perhaps the author intended that the lessons be clear to the reader from the stories he chose. If so I missed it.
In fact I do not believe the author had any lesson in mind. The events described were chosen for their entertainment value, not for any educational purpose. If that is the authors goal, I would say it was a moderate success.
Durschmied is a television corespondent. That witting style is reflected in The Hinge Factor. Each of the seventeen short vignettes is filled with action and keeps a fast pace. The author never gets boughed down in details or pesky facts. Since each story stands on its own, it is easy to pick the book up and read any one at random. The helps the book server as an occasional diversion.

Erik Durschmied's "The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History" is a book that means well, but somehow due to the author himself gets off track & not in a good way. Across 17 separate events in history ranging from the Trojan Horse to Desert Storm, Durschmied examines exactly why these turning points turned out the way they did & what could've caused them to go differently. The events themselves aren't bad to be honest & the ones specifically picked out go from the well known to the obscure. However, it's where he describes his "hinge factor" that a bit of arrogance per se from the author comes into play which is unnecessary in his comments since they are a tad unnecessary in their wording. Overall, this isn't a bad book to read & the hypothetical situations out of this book's what if's make it worth reading, but overall if the author left his personal bias out of the actual "hinge factors" the book would be more enjoyable.

Virtually any book that attempts to summarize this many battles is necessarily superficial. Given this drawback, the author does a fair job of summarizing epic battles. In my opinion, however, his approach is overly journalistic and popular in style. the author is overly glib in characterizing losing generals as 'stupid'. Surely some commanders made devastating mistakes but 'stupid' is a general feature of a person's intellect. No doubt some of the officers that the author describes as 'stupid' were intelligent men who made poor decisions based on poor information, limited visability, and the socalled 'cloud of war.'

It is also, in my opinion, a mistake to call a commander 'stupid' based on one losing battle. Obviously, commanders such as Napoleon and Lee were truly gifted commanders but both made significant mistakes in Russia and Gettysburg, respectively. At the same time, I disagree with a previous reviewer about Lee's performance at Antietam. McClellan, with Lee's full 'order of battle' in hand and a numerically, and better provisioned army at his disposal, should have crushed Lee's force, forcing the Civil War to a conclusion two years before Appomatox. In this regard, McClellan failed. The author claims that Lee had 12,000 casualties to McClellan's 10,000. Maybe. This estimate, however, fails to take into account that Jackson had already taken 11,000 blue-coated prisoners at Harpers Ferry. When these are added in, troops knocked out of commission comes up strongly in Lee's favor at 12,000 Confederate lost to 21,000 Federal. Lee's 'failure' revolved around a single, devastating mistake...the loss of 3 cigars. If this hadn't happened, McClellan may well have been permanently crippled; there would have been no Emancipation Proclamation; the Confederacy may have been recognized by both France and England; and the United States would have been split into two antagonistic nations.

Some of Durchschmied's chapters are, however, excellent. I especially enjoyed his rendition of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was almost there and the fact that I wasn't is one of my major disappointments in life. Still, Durchschmied justifiably praises Kennedy's 'Ich bin ein Berliner' without even mentioning Helmut Kohl, Walesca, the Pope, Thatcher or Reagan. Mr. Reagan's challenge to the Soviet's 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!!!' was more resonant and produced far more results than Kennedy's plea almost thirty years earlier. The fact that Duchschmied didn't mention it quite possibly reflects his liberal journalistic bias.

Ron Braithwaite author of novels...'Skull Rack' and 'Hummingbird God'...on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico

Mr Durschmied has written a fascinating book where the battles recounted are so vividly described that you can't put the book down. He is a gifted writer and the historical cases he has chosen are well balanced and representative of the various ages of military history. Although this book is not to be used as a reference or scholarly work, it is fantastic for firing the readers'interest about some not so well known historical periods and the methods of fighting.

Think of this as a novelization of famous military battles - unless you believe a stenographer was recording all the conversations at Agincourt in 1415. If you like military history, you'll probably enjoy these. Prior military knowledge will help, as the author doesn't always provide much context, and occasionally lapses into military jargon.

The title theme - the various factors that influenced these battles - seems like an after-thought, added by an author or publisher who thought the book needed a hook. Durschmied's "hinge factors" range from good strategy to bad weather to a swarm of bees, and focusing on them adds no interest or depth to the book.