ABSTRACT
The long duel fought by France and Britain between 1689 and 1815 for control of the oceans and the colonial wealth to which they gave access – a duel that was truly decisive for the future of both nations – was a long drawn-out war of attrition, which France abandoned only when victory became clearly unattainable. The first outcome is the ideal at which the professional military will, understandably, always aim – the truly ‘decisive’ victory on the battlefield. There was a further factor that had made European colonial warfare ‘decisive’. Had Hitler studied the European wars of imperial conquest that he so much admired, he would have realised the immensity of the problem with which his military victories presented him. Hitler, on the contrary, systematically destroyed the indigenous elites who might have cooperated with him in ruling Russia, and had no plans for long-term pacification except settlement maintained by terror.
