A History of Warfare

by John Keegan

  The dominance established by the strongmen might have ensured that of firearms, but exactly the contrary was the outcome. By the end of the seventeenth century the use of firearms had become almost extinct in Japan, the weapons themselves great rarities. Only a handful of Japanese knew how to make firearms or to cast cannon, and most surviving cannon dated from before 1620. That state of affairs continued until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the arrival of Commodore Perry’s ‘black ships’ in Tokyo Bay in 1854 peremptorily reintroduced the Japanese to the imperatives of gunpowder. In the intervening 250 years, however, the Japanese had done without gunpowder altogether. The impetus to self-denial had come from the last of the strongmen, Tokugawa Ieyasu, whose campaign of pacification had culminated in his accesssion to the shogunate. How and why had he outlawed the gun?

  The ‘how’ is simple to explain. First came a general disarming of the populace instituted in 1587 by Ieyasu’s predecessor, Hideyoshi, who decreed that all non-samurai were to hand in all weapons — swords and guns alike — to the government, which it was announced intended to use the metal in the construction of an enormous statue of the Buddha. The purpose of the programme was, of course, to further the pacification of Japan by restoring a monopoly of arms to the military class, which was under government control. European governments enacted similar measures in the gunpowder age, though they took decades to achieve their object. In Japan, where justice was savage and peremptory, it was achieved at once.42

  Then, from 1607 onward, Ieyasu instituted a system that centralised the manufacture of firearms and cannon and denominated the government as the only authorised purchaser. All gunfounders and gunsmiths were ordered to take their workshops to the city of Nagahama, the four chief gunsmiths were promoted to samurai rank, thus securing their loyalty to the sword-bearing class, and a decree was promulgated that no order for a weapon could be filled unless approved by the Commissioner for Guns. He, in turn, proved willing to approve only those orders placed by the government, which in its turn progressively decreased its purchasing, until by 1706 Nagahama production in even years was 35 large matchlocks, in odd years 250 small ones. Distributed among a warrior class of some half a million — by which they were used chiefly in ceremonial processions — such numbers proved insignificant. Gun control had worked. Japan retreated from the gunpowder age.

  But why? This is a much more complex question. Guns were unquestionably a symbol of foreign intrusion. They were associated, illogically but inescapably, with the spread of Christianity by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, who were judged to be harbingers of invasion — invasion on the scale which had recently made the Philippines a Spanish possession — and Ieyasu’s successor, Hidetada, rigidly enforced the suppression and expulsion orders that his predecessors had belatedly introduced. The shogunate’s suspicion of Christianity and all its appurtenances was reinforced by the Shimbara Rebellion, raised by native Christians in 1637 and fought with gunpowder. When it was over, the Tokugawa shogunate’s authority was not challenged again for more than 200 years, and the closing of the country against foreigners and foreign influences it had imposed the previous year became complete.

  An additional inclination towards chauvinism may have been exerted by Japan’s only foreign-policy adventure, an invasion of Korea in 1592, apparently intended as the preliminary to an over-ambitious aggression against China, which ended unsuccessfully in 1598. Yet more important than the rejection of things foreign, and profoundly underlying it, was the recognition that the gun made for social instability. A gun in the hands of a commoner or freebooter could topple the lordliest noble, as every European knight of the gunpowder age knew. Cervantes has Don Quixote condemn ‘an invention which allows a base and cowardly hand to take the life of a brave knight’.43

  The third reason for gun control in Japan was that it could actually be imposed. European warriors might deplore the effects of gunpowder on their chosen way of life, but with an open frontier to the south-east, against which the Ottoman Turks battered enthusiastically with great cannon, they had no option but to batter back if Christendom were to survive. Once Christendom was divided by the Reformation at the precise moment when technology made cannon mobile and personal firearms reliable, inhibitions against Christian shooting at Christian were dissolved. No such factors impinged on Japan. Distance and the military reputation of its people protected it from the European voyagers; China had neither the navy nor the inclination to invade it; there were no other potential invaders. Domestically, the Japanese, though divided by class and faction, formed a single cultural unit. Gunpowder was therefore not essential to national security, nor was it sought as a means to victory by factions opposed to each other ideologically.

  Gunpowder was also irreconcilable with the ethos of the Japanese warrior when that ethos had strong protectors. The Tokugawa shogunate was more than a political institution. It was a cultural instrument. The cultural historian G.B. Sansom wrote:

  Not confining [itself] to the functions of raising revenue and keeping order, [it] undertook to regulate the morals of the people and to prescribe their behaviour in the minutest detail. It is doubtful whether previous history records a more ambitious attempt on the part of a state to interfere with the private life of every individual and so to control the thoughts as well as actions of a whole nation.44

  Particular attention was given to regulating the thoughts and actions of the sword-bearing class, and the only manual of arms compatible with polite learning in Japan was that of the samurai sword. The Tokugawas and their predecessors may have used gunpowder for reasons of Realpolitik; once it served their purpose of winning them power, it and all firearms became detestable.

  The cult of the sword had many sources. It was fostered by Zen Buddhism, which stressed ‘two supreme ideals — fidelity and an indifference to physical hardship’. It was reinforced by the culture of the warrior class, ‘a culture that paid meticulous attention to the formal, the ceremonious, and the elegantly expressed in life and art’; Japanese swordplay, like that of the European fencing-master, was as much an art as a skill, governed by rules of deportment and gesture which epitomised the Japanese concern for ‘style’ in every aspect of existence.45 It seems to have partaken of the Japanese belief in the importance of unity with nature and natural forces, since muscular effort is ‘natural’ while the chemical energy of gunpowder is not. It undoubtedly coincided with the Japanese respect for tradition, since not only was swordplay traditional, but the best swords themselves were often ancient heirlooms with their own personal names, handed on from father to son just as the family name — in itself a distinction restricted to sword-owners — was as well.

  Such swords have become collector’s items today. Yet they remain more than beautiful antiques. First-quality samurai swords were the best edged weapons that have ever been made. Observes a historian of the anti-gunpowder campaign:

  There exists in Japan a film showing a machine-gun barrel being sliced in half by a sword from the forge of the great fifteenth-century maker, Kanemoto II. If this seems improbable, one must remember that smiths like Kanemoto hammered and folded and rehammered, day after day, until a sword blade contained something like four million layers of finely forged steel.46

  It is, of course, impossible to disarm a population completely when scythes and flails lie to hand. But the tools of everyday life make poor implements of combat against such specialist weapons. In ensuring that warriors had a monopoly of swords, the Tokugawa were guaranteeing the samurai’s place at the pinnacle of Japanese society.

  The Tokugawa’s logic was not Clausewitz’s logic. Though he apparently believed that his analysis of the nature of warfare was value-free, he had nevertheless been infected by the contemporary European belief that mankind is naturally drawn to ‘politics’ or ‘political activity’ and that politics is intrinsically dynamic, indeed ‘progressive’. This was a view that the Duke of Wellington, a natural conservative and principled opponent of the French Revolution, endo
rsed with the full weight of his disapproval. Clausewitz did indeed seem to perceive politics as an autonomous activity, the meeting-place of rational forms and emotional forces, in which reason and feeling are the determinants but in which culture — that great cargo of shared beliefs, values, associations, myths, taboos, imperatives, customs, traditions, manners and ways of thought, speech and artistic expression which ballast every society — plays no determining role. The Tokugawa reaction proves how wrong he was, demonstrating as it does so well the truth that war may be, among many other things, the perpetuation of a culture by its own means.

  A CULTURE WITHOUT WAR

  Clausewitz’s belief in the primacy of politics rather than culture was not, however, personal to him. It was the position of Western philosophers from Aristotle onward and it received in Clausewitz’s own lifetime powerful reinforcements from the spectacle of pure political ideas — themselves the product of living philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau — in free action against passion and prejudice in the streets of Paris. The wars Clausewitz knew, the wars in which he fought, were the wars of the French Revolution, and the ‘political motive’ for which he always looked as the precipitating and controlling factor in warmaking was, at the outset at least, always present. Europe’s dynastic states correctly feared that the French Revolution was a threat to monarchy; war clearly appeared to be ‘a continuation of politics’.

  It must also be recognised that Clausewitz as a historian had nothing to guide him toward the importance of cultural factors in human affairs. Comparative history, of which cultural history is the child, was not an approach adopted by any of the leading historians whom he might have taken as model. Sir Isaiah Berlin in one of his salutes to the father of comparative history, Giambattista Vico, perfectly sums up the spirit of the Enlightenment as a belief that ‘a universally valid method had been found for the solution of the fundamental questions that had exercised men at all times — how to establish what was true and what was false in every province of knowledge’.47

  The greatest publicist of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, even while he advocated the widening of historical inquiry to embrace social and economic activities and their effects, strongly believed that the only objects worthy of historical study were the peaks, not the valleys, of the achievements of mankind … ‘If you have no more to tell us’, Voltaire declared, ‘than that one barbarian succeeded another on the banks of the Oxus or Ixartes, what use are you to the public?’48

  Where Voltaire led, who was Clausewitz not to follow? In the decades of the nineteenth century after his death, German historians became pioneers of the comparative method in history and politics, but in his lifetime, the Enlightenment ruled. ‘We see, therefore, that under all circumstances war is to be regarded not as an independent thing, but as a political instrument; and it is only by taking this view that we can avoid finding ourselves in opposition to all military history,’ he wrote.49 What more perfectly Enlightenment, more purely Voltairean view could possibly be expressed?

  Yet Voltaire, in his contemptuous dismissal of the importance of events on the banks of the Oxus, strikes Clausewitzian theory a blow. Military historians now recognise that the banks of the Oxus are to warfare what Westminster is to parliamentary democracy or the Bastille to revolutions. On or near the banks of the Oxus — the river that separates Central Asia from Persia and the Middle East — man learned to tame the horse, to harness it for driving, and eventually to ride it under a saddle. It was from the Oxus that conquerors rode forth to found ‘chariot empires’ in China, India and Europe. It was on the Oxus that the cavalry revolution, one of the two indisputable revolutions in warmaking, took place. It was across the Oxus that successive waves of Central Asian conquerors and despoilers — Huns, Avars, Magyars, Turks, Mongols — broke into the Western world. It was at Samarkand, just north of the Oxus, that Tamerlane, the most pointlessly destructive of the horse chieftains, began his reign of terror. The early caliphs recruited their slave soldiers on the Oxus; so too did the Ottoman sultans. The Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, threatening the heartland of Christendom, remained the most disruptive military episode in the memories of Clausewitz’s contemporaries. A theory of war that did not take into account the Oxus and all it stood for was a defective theory. Clausewitz constructed such a theory, none the less, and with calamitous effects.

  In the years after the First World War, radical military writers held Clausewitz circumstantially if not directly responsible for the recent carnage. The British historian B.H. Liddell Hart, for example, inculpated him of urging the largest possible offensive with the largest possible numbers as the key to victory. But in the years after the Second World War, he was raised to new heights, in a virtual apotheosis, as the greatest military thinker, past, present and — here was the indication of the infatuation he had rekindled — future also. Academic strategists of the Cold War years proclaimed that, in the gloom that a nuclear winter threatened, Clausewitz offered a guiding light of universal truth. His detractors were given short shrift: Liddell Hart’s notorious attack on him was dismissed, for example, as a ‘caricature’.50

  The academic strategists were conflating an observation with a hypothesis. The observation is that war is a universal phenomenon, practised at all times and all places since the retreat of the last Ice Age; the hypothesis is that there is a universally true theory of the objects of war, and of how those objects may best be achieved. It is easy to see why they were seduced by Clausewitz: under threat of nuclear attack, a state has no option but to align its foreign policy as closely as possible with strategic doctrine, and to extrude from the interstices all modifying qualifications. A nuclear state must appear to mean what it says, since deterrence depends upon convincing an adversary of one’s fixity of purpose, and mental reservation is the enemy of conviction.

  Nuclear deterrence was and is abhorrent to humane sentiment, however, since it implies that a state, if required to defend its own existence, will act with pitiless disregard for the consequences to its own and its adversary’s peoples. Little wonder that, in the Western world at least, where politics in the last 2000 years has institutionalised the Judaeo-Christian belief in the unique value of the individual, deterrence theory evokes the deepest repugnance, often from patriots devoted to the national defence, even from professional warriors who have shed their own blood for their countries.

  To invent a philosophy that would integrate nuclear-deterrence theory and the common morality and political ethics of the democratic states was a task that might well have defeated the ingenuity even of the cleverest theorists. But they did not need to do this. In Clausewitz they found ready to hand a philosophy and vocabulary of military extremism to which history had given currency. With nuclear weapons, ‘real war’ and ‘true war’ were believed to be the same thing; and the contemplation of the horror of such an identification was believed in itself to guarantee that war would not occur.

  There was a double weakness in this logic, however. First, it was entirely mechanistic; it depended upon the procedures of deterrence working faultlessly in all circumstances. Yet if there is one observable truth of politics, it is that mechanistic means have a poor record of controlling the behaviour of governments. Second, it required the citizens of states with nuclear weapons to cultivate a schizophrenic outlook on the world: while sustaining their beliefs in the sanctity of human life, respect for the rights of the individual, tolerance of minority opinion, acceptance of the free vote, accountability of the executive to representative institutions and everything else that is meant by the rule of law, democracy and the Judaeo-Christian ethic — nuclear weapons were deployed to protect these values — they were at the same time expected to acquiesce in the code of the warrior, of which physical courage, subordination to the heroic leader and ‘might is right’ are the ultimate values. This schizophrenia, moreover, was to be permanent since, in the catchphrase of the nuclear theorists, ‘nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented’.

  Robert McNamara, Se
cretary of Defense in President John F. Kennedy’s administration, epitomised Clausewitzian deterrent logic in a speech he gave in 1962 at the University of Michigan, in the heartland of American humanist values. ‘The very strength and nature of the alliance [NATO, but essentially American] forces makes it possible for us to retain, even in the face of a massive surprise attack, sufficient reserve striking power to destroy an enemy society if driven to it,’ he said.51 This threat to visit ‘true war’ on an enemy that initiated ‘real war’ had a philosophical purity that Clausewitz might well have cheered. But the cheer would have been a cry from the past. For Clausewitz, as I have said, was even in his time an isolated spokesman for a warrior culture that the ancestors of the modern state were at pains to extirpate within their own borders. Naturally they recognised its value for state purposes, but they allowed it to survive only by localising it within a collection of artificially preserved warrior bands; the regiments were wholly different in ethos from that of the civil society in which they were garrisoned.

  In earlier times European society had been heavily suffused by warrior values and practices; then, from the seventeenth century, through a sustained policy of depriving the population of firearms, destroying the castles of the provincial grandees, appropriating their sons as regular officers, creating specialist corps of artillerists officered from the non-warrior classes and monopolising the production of battlefield weapons in state arsenals, the sort of governments of which Clausewitz was a servant effectively demilitarised European society everywhere west of the Oder and Drava rivers, that is to say from Berlin and Vienna to the Atlantic.