The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern

by Victor Davis Hanson

  True, the instant communications of the twenty-first century may now compress decision making in ways undreamed of in the past. Contemporary generals must be skilled at giving news conferences that can influence the views of millions worldwide. Yet these are really just new wrinkles on the old creased face of war. The improvised explosive device versus the up-armored Humvee is simply an updated take on the catapult versus the stonewall, or the harquebus versus the mailed knight. The long history of war suggests no static primacy of the defensive or the offensive. No law dictates one sort of weapon system over another, but just temporary advantages gained by particular strategies and technologies that go unanswered for a time by less adept adversaries.

  So it is highly doubtful, the study of war again reminds us, that a new weapon will emerge from the Pentagon or anywhere else that will change the very nature of armed conflict—unless some sort of genetic engineering so alters man’s brain chemistry that he begins to act in unprecedented ways. We fought the 1991 Gulf War with dazzling, computer-enhanced weaponry. But lost in the technological pizzazz was the basic wisdom that generals and their overseers need to fight wars with political objectives in mind.

  In contrast, the result of “defeating” Saddam in four days in 1991 was subsequent wars between 1991 and the present to rid Iraq of the Baathists and their legacy. To conclude wars decisively and achieve prewar aims, the victor must defeat, and often even humiliate militarily, an enemy and force the loser to abandon prewar behavior before offering a magnanimous peace. “Humiliate,” here, does not mean to gratuitously insult or ridicule a prostrate enemy but rather to show him that the wages of his unprovoked aggression are the end of his ability to make war on others.

  In postmodern war, the word “victory” often appears in such quotation marks as a philosophical construct; it is supposedly mired in complexities and spoken only by the near savage, who insists that our intricate nuclear world is still fathomable in terms of nation-states and conventional armies. But the idea of winning will never disappear. It is an easily definable and timeless military concept of forcing an opponent to cease fighting, to abandon the real or imagined reasons for his bellicosity, and to agree to the conditions set down by those powers demonstrably able to so affect his thinking and behavior. Victory may now require a level of force deemed objectionable by civilized peoples, meaning that some, for justifiable reasons, may be reluctant to pursue it. But victory has not become an ossified concept altogether.

  For some reason, no American general or diplomat seemed to understand that crucial point seventeen years ago—or perhaps they felt that United Nations troops had already inflicted an inordinate amount of damage on the Baathist state. The result was that on the cessation of hostilities, Saddam Hussein’s supposedly defeated generals used their gunships to butcher Kurds and Shiites while the apparently victorious Americans looked on. And because we never quite understood or achieved the war’s proper aim—ensuring that Iraq’s dictatorship would not use its petro-wealth to destroy the peace of a globally critical region—we returned to fight a second war of NATO-enforced no-fly zones above Iraq. Then there was a third war to remove Saddam, and then again a fourth war, of counterinsurgency, to protect the fledgling Iraqi democracy.

  Military history reminds us of important anomalies and paradoxes—especially the futility of most prewar wisdom. When Sparta invaded Attica in the first spring of the Peloponnesian War (431 B.C.), the historian Thucydides recounts, it expected the Athenians to surrender after a few short seasons of ravaging. But the Athenians had no intention of surrendering or conceding anything—and suffered little until a plague broke out and did more damage than thousands of Spartan ravagers had during five separate invasions. Twenty-seven years later, the maritime Athenians, deemed “lords of the sea,” lost the war at sea to Sparta, an insular land power that started the conflict with scarcely a navy.

  William Tecumseh Sherman was removed from command in October 1861, and accused of being “crazy,” after suggesting that Union forces might need 200,000 troops to clear and hold Kentucky. Given the fact that the North had fielded some 2.5 million soldiers at Civil War’s end, Sherman appeared in retrospect to have been clairvoyant. In the heyday of Allied victory in 1918–19, Marshal Ferdinand Foch predicted that the Versailles Treaty guaranteed a war with Germany in two decades: “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years,” he said. Though he was scoffed at by utopians, he was off by only a few months. The 2003 removal of Saddam refuted the doom-and-gloom critics who had predicted thousands of deaths and millions of refugees, just as the subsequent messy six-year reconstruction has not yet ensured the anticipated quiet, stable democracy envisioned by proponents of the removal of the Baathist regime.

  Other anomalies can be learned from studying military history, such as the fact that the size of an army does not always guarantee battlefield success: The victors of the landmark battles at Salamis, Issos, Mexico City, and Lepanto were all outnumbered. And war’s most savage moments—the Allied summer offensive of 1918, the Russian siege of Berlin in the spring of 1945, the Battle of the Bulge, Hiroshima—often unfold right before hostilities cease. Democratic leaders during war—Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, George Bush—often leave office either disgraced or unpopular. Too often we use contemporary wisdom or innate logic to try to make sense of impending conflicts, rather than look to the history of past wars, which are frequently unpredictable and nearly inexplicable.

  It would be reassuring to think that the righteousness of a cause, or the bravery of an army, or the nobility of a sacrifice would ensure public support for a war. At times, these reasons have and should. But military history shows that once a conflict begins, the perception of winning becomes far more important to the public. Citizens turn abruptly on any leader deemed culpable for losing. “Public sentiment is everything,” wrote Abraham Lincoln. “With public sentiment nothing can fail. Without it nothing can succeed. Consequently, he who moulds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions.”

  Lincoln knew that lesson well. Gettysburg and Vicksburg were brilliant Union victories that by summer 1863 had restored Lincoln’s previously shaky credibility and strengthened his abolitionist aims. But a year later, after the losses at Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Petersburg, and Cold Harbor—Cold Harbor alone claimed seven thousand Union casualties in a few hours—the public reviled him and might well have been willing to live with a slaveholding Confederate nation next door. Neither Lincoln nor his policies had changed, but the Confederate ability to kill large numbers of Union soldiers had. And had General Sherman not taken Atlanta in spectacular fashion on September 2, 1864 (“Atlanta is ours, and fairly won”), President Lincoln—for all his rhetorical skills, his moral authority, and his strategic insight—would have lost the November election to General George McClellan and his copperhead supporters.

  Ultimately, public opinion follows the ups and downs, including the perception of the ups and downs, of the battlefield, since victory excites the most ardent pacifist and defeat silences the most frothing zealot. After the defeat of France, Dunkirk, the losses to the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, the U-boat rampage, and the fall of Greece, Singapore, and Tobruk, Winston Churchill took the blame for a war that was seemingly lost, until the brilliant prime minister’s victories in North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy shortly after.

  When the successful military action against Saddam Hussein ended in April 2003, more than 70 percent of the American people backed the invasion of Iraq, with politicians and pundits alike elbowing each other aside to take credit for their prescient support. By 2007, four years of insurgency later, Americans opposed the orphaned war by nearly the same margin. General George S. Patton may have been uncouth, but he wasn’t wrong when he bellowed, “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.”

  The American public turned on the Iraq War not because of the antiwar oratory of Cindy Sheehan or the cinematographic propaganda of Michael Moor
e or the lack of nerve gas in Saddam’s bunkers, but because it felt that the battlefield news had become uniformly bad and that the price in American lives and treasure for ensuring Iraqi reform had become too dear. The public grew tired of seeing Americans blown up in Humvees each night on television, tired of Iraqis shouting “Death to America,” and tired of being told that our blood and treasure was worth “their” freedom. When General David Petraeus promised that a surge of American troops could salvage Iraq, critics pilloried him as “General Betray Us”; when his soldiers did just what he had promised, pundits were suddenly talking of his presidential timber.

  General Douglas MacArthur’s peers initially laughed at his proposal for a daring landing at Incheon when Americans were about to be pushed off the Korean peninsula far to the south at Pusan. Then the general was deified when he pulled it off and all but won the war—only to be finally demonized for recklessly pursuing the defeated North Koreans far to the north, where rough terrain, freezing temperatures, and hundreds of thousands of Chinese ensured American catastrophe. Few American commentators evaluated MacArthur’s strategic sense at various stages in his generalship in Korea; it was instead the perception of whether he was winning or losing that mattered most to the public.

  The Morality of Military History

  MILITARY HISTORY HAS a moral purpose: educating us about past sacrifices that have secured our present freedom and security. If we know nothing of Shiloh, Belleau Wood, Tarawa, and Chosin, the crosses in our military cemeteries are reduced to just pleasant white markers on lush green lawns. The gaunt faces in the windows of the Veterans Administration hospitals become no different from the faces of those hospitalized because of illness, infirmity, and age. These sacrifices no longer serve as reminders that thousands endured pain and hardship for our right to listen to what we wish and to shop in safety—and that the departed expected future generations, links in this great chain of obligation, to do the same for those not yet born.

  The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, can escape that terrible knowledge. Our freedom is not entirely our own; in some sense it is mortgaged from those who paid the ultimate price for its continuance. My own life of security, freedom, opportunity, and relative affluence certainly has been made possible because a grandfather fought and was gassed in the Argonne; an uncle in the Marines died trying to stop Japanese imperialism on Okinawa; a cousin in the Army lost his life at twenty-two trying to stop Hitler in France; and my father in the Army Air Force flew forty times over Japan hoping to end the idea of the expansive Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. I have spent some time these past decades trying to learn where, how, and why they and their generations fought as they did—and what our own obligations are to acknowledge their sacrifices.

  What has changed in our perceptions of war in and outside the university over the more than thirty years since I first studied war in an esoteric dissertation on the ravaging of farms in the classical Greek world? War, like agriculture, certainly has not disappeared, although its superficial face has seemingly changed as much as family farming has been superseded by corporate agribusiness.

  Instead, there have been ever more varieties of war, large and small, nearly bloodless and nearly genocidal, insurgencies and conventional conflicts—in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Chechnya, the Congo, East Timor, Grenada, the Falklands, Iran, Iraq, Panama, Pakistan, Rwanda, and other landscapes too numerous to cite. The public interest in reading about these conflicts, whether measured through books sales or television ratings, has seldom been higher. And yet as popular culture, research institutions, and journalists explore conflict as never before, the formal study of military history remains the orphaned child of the college and university, as if we academics could wish away what we fear to be inescapable.

  Does that even matter? And if so, what, then, can we do to restore the study of war to its proper place in the life of the American mind? The challenge is not just to reform the graduate schools or the professoriate, though that would help, since the universities offer a collective common learning experience to millions of young Americans who will inherit self-governance in the decades ahead, and may one day decide when, how, and why their children are to fight.

  On a deeper level, we need to reexamine the larger forces that have devalued the very idea of military history—of the understanding of war itself. We must question the well-meaning but naive faith that with enough money, education, or good intentions we can change the nature of mankind so that conflict, as if by fiat, becomes a thing of the past. Such entrenched academic thinking if sanctioned by our university elite, may well encourage some to begin wars. In the end, the study of war reminds us that we will never quite evolve into gods but simply remain mere mortals. And that means some will always prefer war to peace; and other men and women, hopefully the more numerous and powerful who have learned from the past, will have a moral obligation to stop them.

  Studying War: Where to Start

  THE BEST PLACE to begin studying war is with the stories of soldiers themselves. E. B. Sledge’s memoir With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa is nightmarish, but it reminds us that while war often translates to rot, filth, and carnage, it can also be in the service of a noble cause. Elmer Bendiner’s tragic retelling of the annihilation of B-17s over Germany, The Fall of Fortresses: A Personal Account of the Most Daring, and Deadly, American Air Battles of World War II, is an unrecognized classic.

  For a different wartime perspective, that of the generals, Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs is justly celebrated as a model of prose. Yet the nearly contemporaneous Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman is far more analytical in its dissection of the human follies and pretensions that lead to war. Likewise, George S. Patton’s War as I Knew It is not only a compilation of the eccentric general’s diary entries but also a candid assessment of human nature itself. Xenophon’s Anabasis, the story of how the Greek Ten Thousand fought their way out of the Persian Empire, begins the genre of the general’s memoir.

  Fiction often captures the experience of war as effectively as memoir, beginning with Homer’s Iliad, in which Achilles confronts the paradox that rewards do not always go to the most deserving in war. The three most famous novels about the futility of conflict are Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914. No work has better insights on the folly of war, however, than Euripides’ Trojan Women or Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.

  Although many contemporary critics find it passé to document landmark battles in history, one can find a storehouse of information in The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: From Marathon to Waterloo, by Edward S. Creasy, and A Military History of the Western World, by J. F. C. Fuller. Hans Delbrück’s History of the Art of War and Russell F. Weigley’s The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo center their sweeping histories on decisive engagements, using battles like Marathon and Waterloo to illustrate larger social, political, and cultural values. A sense of high drama permeates William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru, while tragedy more often characterizes Steven Runciman’s spellbinding The Fall of Constantinople, 1453, and Donald R. Morris’s massive The Washing of the Spears: A History of the Rise of the Zulu Nation Under Shaka and Its Fall in the Zulu War of 1879. The most comprehensive and accessible one-volume treatment of history’s most destructive war remains Gerhard L. Weinberg’s A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II.

  Relevant histories for our current struggle with Middle East terrorism are Alistair Horne’s superb A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, Michael B. Oren’s Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, and Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War. While anything John Keegan writes is worth reading, his The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincou
rt, Waterloo, and the Somme remains the most impressive general military history of the last fifty years.

  Biography too often winds up ignored in the study of war. Plutarch’s lives of Pericles, Alcibiades, Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Alexander the Great established the traditional view of these great captains as men of action, while weighing their record of near-superhuman achievement against their megalomania. Elizabeth Longford’s Wellington is a classic study of England’s greatest soldier. Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command, by Douglas Southall Freeman, for all its detractors, remains spellbinding.

  If “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” as Carl von Clausewitz stated, then study of civilian wartime leadership is critical. The classic scholarly account of the proper relationship between the military and its overseers is still Samuel P. Huntington’s The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations. For a contemporary j’accuse of American military leadership during the Vietnam War, see H. R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam.

  Eliot A. Cohen’s Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime, purportedly a favorite read of George W. Bush’s, argues that successful leaders like Ben-Gurion, Churchill, Clemenceau, and Lincoln kept a tight rein on their generals and never confused officers’ esoteric military expertise with either political sense or strategic resolution.

  In The Mask of Command, Keegan examines the military competence of Alexander the Great, Wellington, Grant, and Hitler, and comes down on the side of the two who fought under consensual government. In The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny, I took that argument further and suggested that three of history’s most audacious generals—Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton—were also keen political thinkers, with strategic insight into what made their democratic armies so formidable.