Ripples of Battle

by Victor Davis Hanson

  And then Bill Twigger finished with a final, heartrending anecdote—which I think I can quote without embarrassment to the parties involved: “There is a tragic sequel to this event. Upon hearing of Victor’s death, young Peter Madigan lost his moorings, rose from his thus-far secure position and with loud shouting and cursing rushed into the open only to be cut down by rifle fire.” In explanation and recollection, Twigger wrote of Madigan’s near simultaneous death, “Trivia and vulgarity had no places in Victor’s vernacular. A hulk of a guy, the heftiest of us all, he was befriended by the ‘runt’ of the bunch, Peter Madigan.” Twigger elaborated on what a fine person Madigan had been, in moving language, like Sherer’s, that today’s graduate students could only hope to emulate.

  But still this was not the end to this strange unfolding cycle of events. Finally, on March 31, 2002, on the eve of the fifty-seventh anniversary of the landing on Okinawa, I received an unexpected call from one Louis Ittmann, another veteran of Fox Company who had also learned of my inquiry. Yes, he too had known Victor Hanson quite well, and confirmed the picture of him—a massive, good-natured Swedish college graduate who bled to death from a machine gun burst on Sugar Loaf Hill. After an engaging conversation, Louis Ittmann finished by requesting something quite unexpected: would I, he asked, like Victor’s ring?

  Ring?

  Was this 1945 or 2002, I thought—and was I a comfortable forty-eight-year-old professor, or the old Swedish patriarch Nels Hanson, tottering out in his vineyard at eighty-one, stricken with the news of his lost grandson? Ittmann then explained. In a premonition of his death on Sugar Loaf Hill, Victor had earlier asked his friends to, in the event of his demise, remove his treasured ring and send it home. They had tried; but in attempting to deliver it to Kingsburg, California, out of courtesy they had first called our farm. The distraught family—my uncle, grandparents, and cousins—was too upset to come to the phone. Thus the good steward, Louis Ittmann, since that awful night fifty-seven years ago, had watched over Victor’s ring. On May 21, 2002, it arrived in the mail, its band cut, either from wear or the necessary efforts to remove it from the finger of Victor sometime after he was brought down from Sugar Loaf Hill. I am now holding it as I write this, and as a classicist I am mesmerized by the engraved silhouette of a Roman legionary. When did Victor buy it? And why was a Roman soldier on a ring of a farm boy in central California of the late 1930s and 1940s?

  Since my parents are dead and the rest of most other Hansons as well, those and other questions I suppose will remain unanswered. But I do know that I have never communicated with more gracious men than those 6th Marine Division veterans of that awful night on May 18 on Okinawa—Whitaker, Sherer, Senko, Twigger, Ittmann, and a few others—who kindly and freely shared their remembrances with me by letter and phone some fifty-seven years later. There was no bitterness evident in their prose and in their voices against the questionable strategy of sending them all head-on against the entrenched and veteran crack troops just weeks before the war’s end; nor any lasting hatred mentioned of the Japanese; nor apologies for their tough combat; nor anything but moving appreciation expressed for this present country, especially in this current trial of our own.

  When I asked whether there could have been another way to win Okinawa, one sighed and said, “Maybe—but Okinawa was an island of thousands of enemy soldiers in our way to Japan, and we couldn’t just leave that many of them behind us. We were at war.” When I pressed further whether the tactics of head-on charges against entrenched troops made sense, the general consensus was, “Who knows? But that was the Marine way and we accepted it. It was our job to take the island, and we did it.” Despite the horror of what they went through, there seemed a Virgilian sense of pride in their sacrifice: Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit [Perhaps there shall come a day when it will be sweet to remember even these things].

  Given the large number of American dead on Okinawa, I do not believe that the good and experienced men who planned the storming of Okinawa—Operation Iceberg—in the luxury suites of the San Francisco St. Francis Hotel were all that wise in the manner of their war making. Neither do I give all that much credence to the United States Army’s official narrative of the campaign, which concluded with the confident excuse, “The military value of Okinawa exceeded all hope.” I acknowledge that both traditional and revisionist historians have only scorn for those like me who question the need for or the logic of Iceberg—and I can offer no alternative to the strategy of taking the island that might have ensured fewer dead on either side. Surely I do not know how the Americans could have gone ahead with plans to invade Japan with the knowledge that they either could not or would not eliminate first a veteran army of 110,000 Japanese on Okinawa at their rear. And I also know that others more illustrious died on Okinawa—Ernie Pyle, Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner himself, and several Medal of Honor winners. And I grant that the death of a twenty-three-year-old farm boy I never met from Kingsburg, California, pales besides two hundred thousand combined Japanese soldiers and Okinawan civilians incinerated, blown apart, and slowly starved to death that summer. Yes, I accept all that, but I also know of the wide ripples of one man’s death, and as I look at his ring they have not ended—at least not quite yet.

  “Great battles,” Winston Churchill remarked, “change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, in armies and in nations.” They do, and we Americans, individually and collectively alike, have not yet seen all the “new moods and values” created “in nations” by September 11, 2001. The longer-term ripples of that attack are still washing up—long after the first tidal waves of horror that swept over us in the days following the crashing of airliners into the symbols of American economic and military power.

  We know that there are three thousand dead. A trillion dollars in capital has been lost; $100 billion in property damage was incurred; and millions of Americans were put out of work. The government itself was transformed—citizens worldwide were delayed and disrupted by increased security measures. Access to public facilities is now restricted. Private nagging fear and doubt about future attacks remain. We will not grasp for years the full interplay of events set in motion by the sudden vaporization of thousands in the late summer of 2001. The orphans and children of orphans not yet born will not—cannot—forget September 11 because they are now part of it forever.

  The victims of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the crashing airliners did not fall in pitched battle. They were not even armed. None were expecting their fate. Yet they were nonetheless combat casualties of self-described warriors—indeed, the first terrible fatalities of what may prove to be a long war. And because battle by its very nature radically changes history in ways that even other seminal events—elections, revolutions, inventions, assassinations, and plagues—cannot, it will require decades before historians can chart all the aftershocks that followed September 11.

  Churchill’s “great battles” often dispel the easy assumptions of peacetime, as democracies, once attacked, are aroused from their somnolence to deadly and unpredictable fury. Before the carnage at Shiloh, Ulysses S. Grant forecast that the Civil War would be ended by “one great battle.” Afterward—with more casualties on April 6–8, 1862, than in all of America’s wars up to that time—generals realized that in a novel fight with rifled muskets and canister shot, a great number of young men on both sides would have to die before the South would accept Union primacy. A previously labeled “crazy” Sherman would use his sudden Shiloh fame and the new realities of total war to think the once unthinkable—and in a few months lead thousands on the March to the Sea.

  Just as Grant and his generals woke up from Shiloh on April 8 to a new world, so did Americans on September 12. In a blink the old idea of easy retaliation by using cruise missiles or saber-rattling press conferences seems to have vanished. With the end of that mirage, the two-decade fear of losing a single life to protect freedom and innocent civilians also disappeared. Past ideas of restraint,
once thought to be mature and sober, were now in an instant revealed more to be reckless in their naïveté and derelict by their disastrous consequences. In the years to come we may well see far more nightmarish things in our military arsenal than bunker-busters and daisy-cutters. Americans once feared to retaliate against random bombings; terrorists now wonder when we will stop—as the logic of September 11 methodically advances to its ultimate conclusion. Aroused democracies reply murderously to enemy assaults in a manner absolutely inconceivable to their naïve attackers.

  At peace and in affluence, many Americans look back in revulsion at Hiroshima, but hardly any of these moral censors were mature enough in 1945 to remember Okinawa. They can hardly appreciate what suicidal fanaticism in April, May, and June of that year had taught past generations: over 12,000 American dead, 35,000 more wounded, and over 300 ships damaged. In fact, 35 percent of all American combatants who fought in and around Okinawa were casualties. The Japanese lost 100,000 killed and another 100,000 civilian casualties—much of it in hand-to-hand fighting on this large island, but an island minuscule in comparison with the far better defended and as yet unconquered Japanese mainland.

  Far more often than a suicidal attack on people at work, battle consists of a few hours of reciprocal and organized killing in which thousands of soldiers collide to decide the fate of thousands more to the rear. In the melee, heroism, bravery, or even superior technology cannot guarantee survival. Combatants often perish due to accident and simple bad luck, with consequences that become apparent often only decades later. Battle also is not merely a logical continuance of politics, but an abnormal event in which thousands of warriors—most often in the past, young male adults—are freed to kill each other for a few hours, a dramatic and strange experience bound to change their lives and the fate of their families and friends for centuries thereafter.

  Battles are deliberate and entirely human-inspired. Not being accidental occurrences, they can be even more calamitous to the human psyche than the occasional greater carnage caused by natural disasters or human catastrophes—such as mine explosions or raging fires and floods that fall as acts of God upon the entire civilian population. It is said that divorce can be worse for children than the demise of a parent; so too the battle dead are harder to take for their surviving kin than fatalities from the highway or plague. You see men, not gods, are deliberately responsible for the dead of battle, in the conscious effort to slay other humans and not through mere carelessness or errors in judgment. In time we can come to accept the deaths of loved ones if they fall into chasms or die of infection—less so when we know that their youthful bodies were torn apart by angry humans without help from nature.

  People forgive the ravages of water and flame, but less so Japanese, American, or German slayers. Battle—again so unlike nature—brings with it bothersome and nagging ideas of preventability, culpability, causation, and responsibility married to the lingering notions of what-if?, whose fault?, and he, not it, did this. Anger, passion, and revenge always erupt from battle. “Remember the Alamo,” “. . . the Maine,” or “. . . Pearl Harbor” inflames nations in a way that the far greater losses from polio, Hurricane Carla, or the Anchorage earthquake cannot. We do not bury even heroic lifeguards or smoke jumpers in Arlington National Cemetery or put them atop bronze horses. Hundreds of firemen perish each decade, but rarely instantaneously and in great number trying to rescue thousands of their kin while under attack by a foreign enemy.

  The social sparks that fly from battle ignite entire societies and soon become the flames of history. Herodotus reminds us that in war, fathers bury sons rather than sons fathers. Euripides insists that wives and mothers, like those of his Trojan Women who grieve and suffer over their lost ones, have it worse than soldiers themselves. Historians remind us that our own Civil War was a “rich man’s war, and a poor man’s fight.” The forces of opposition to American segregation that had remained dormant in peace were awakened by World War II—as the nonwhite fought well for a country they loved but that did not accord them full political equality.

  Battles, then, rip open the scabs of wounds of generational rivalry, the age-old competition between the sexes, class struggle, and racial strife. Already Americans ask, “How could aliens so easily enter the United States and under what auspices?”—as the government in response moves radically to reassess the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Meanwhile, the once reactionary idea of profiling suspects by age, gender, religion, and ethnicity should have disappeared—but apparently not altogether when the 19 murderers of 3,000 innocents were uniformly young, male, Islamic, from the Arab world, and living stealthily in the United States.

  Battle is the raucous transformer of history because it also accelerates in a matter of minutes the usually longer play of chance, skill, and fate. Mistakes become fatal in seconds rather than remaining irrelevant lapses of day-to-day existence. Deaths are not the singular and often anticipated events among families, but occur en masse, wholly unexpected, and often horrifically. Education, training, and aristocratic pretension may become meaningless in combat. Many of those with the top-dog views at the World Trade Center were doomed; janitors and clerks on the bottom floor lobbies had a better chance of flight. A destitute homeless person found safety on the sidewalk five blocks away by his very failure and subsequent distance from society’s sophisticated and visible machinery, while a Harvard MBA, distinguished record of hard work and rare discipline, ensured that a stockbroker was in the line of fire as an easy target who had the grand views of Floor 93.

  So battle is a great leveler of human aspiration when it most surely should not be. Stray bullets kill brave men and miss cowards. They tear open great doctors-to-be and yet merely nick soldiers who have a criminal past, pulverizing flesh when there is nothing to be gained and passing harmlessly by when the fate of whole nations is at stake. And that confusion, inexplicability, and deadliness have a tendency to rob us of the talented, inflate the mediocre, and ruin or improve the survivors—but always at least making young men who survive not forget what they have been through.

  Usually, military historians examine decisive battle in either a strategic or tactical context—the role of Lepanto or Hastings in deciding the larger pulse of wars, which end, renew, or are unaffected by a single day’s butchery. Just as commonly, scholars see battle more as the science of how to destroy thousands through maneuver and technology. Books abound on Hannibal’s encirclement at Cannae, the stealth of Arminius, Rommel’s use of Panzers, or LeMay’s devilish brew over Tokyo. But rarely do we appreciate battles as human phenomena or the cumulative effects—the ripples—that change communities for years, or centuries even, well after the day’s killing is over. And to do that we must reexamine some well-known battles of the past in different ways, and measure others that heretofore have not warranted much attention on the grounds of their tactical irrelevance, bad timing, or absence of suitable witnesses and recorders.

  Great men are cut down in battle who could have saved thousands of other lives; families ruined for centuries due to a single bullet. And by the same token, the supposedly mediocre emerge from battle, with the acclaim and opportunity to match their innate (and previously unknown and untapped) talent. Plays, poems, and novels are written because of a day’s fighting, art commissioned, philosophy born. Whole schools of thought are created or deemed flawed by a battle.

  In this regard I plead guilty to the classical notion—more or less continuous from Herodotus and Thucydides to the close of the nineteenth century—of the primacy of military history. In theory, of course, all events have equal historical importance—the creation of a women’s school in nineteenth-century America, the introduction of the stirrup, the domestication of the chicken, or the introduction of the necktie. And such social or cultural developments, whether they are dramatic or piecemeal, do on occasion change the lives of millions.

  Yet in reality, all actions are still not so equal. We perhaps need to recall the more traditional definiti
ons of the craft of history—a formal record of past events that are notable or worthy of remembrance. Whereas I Love Lucy might have transformed the way thousands of Americans in the 1950s and 1960s saw suburban life, women’s roles, or Cubans, it still did not alter the United States in the manner of a Yorktown, Gettysburg, or Tet—in creating, preserving, or almost losing an entire society. It was an event of the past, but not necessarily either notable or worthy of remembrance or commemoration.

  Nor are all battles themselves equal. Ostensibly, the greater the number of participants, the more critical the tactical, strategic, and political stakes at play—and the more blood on the butcher’s bill, the more likely is the engagement to make history. From what we know more than a century after the fact, Gettysburg—whether we look at Lee’s climactic failure to topple the North, the heroism on Little Roundtop, the sheer number of dead and wounded, or Lincoln’s address—was more momentous than Pea Ridge fought in March 1862 to ensure that Missouri would remain in the Northern camp. All remember Salamis, where Western civilization was saved in its eleventh hour from Xerxes; few recall Artemisium weeks earlier, where storms and Greek courage helped hold off for a time the invading Persian fleet.

  Scholars argue over the so-called “great battles” as historians and compilers continue to publish such lists—in no clear agreement whether Antietam or Vicksburg, Normandy Beach or the Bulge, Stalingrad or Kursk were the real seminal events. Yet my purpose here is not to enter that fray other than to discuss its existence in the epilogue. Rather, I wish to show that while all battles are not equivalent in their effects upon civilization, they do share at least this common truth: there will be some fundamental and important consequences beyond other more normal occurrences, given the unnatural idea of men trying to kill each other in a few hours in a relatively confined space. Battles really are the wildfires of history, out of which the survivors float like embers and then land to burn far beyond the original conflagration. To teach us those important lessons we must go back through the past to see precisely how such calamities affected now lost worlds—and yet still influence us today.