Masters of the Battlefield

by Davis, Paul K.

  As Alexander’s army had marched back northward through the Pillars of Jonah—a pass in the Nur Mountains so called because it was thought to be where was the prophet was disgorged by the whale—and onto the plain before arriving at the Pinarus, they had been on the move all day. Rather than stop and scout the battlefield (as he would do later at Gaugamela), Alexander instead marched his men straight into battle lines. They approached in phalanxes thirty-two men deep, then spread out to sixteen-man formations as they came nearer the river, and finally deployed into phalanxes eight men deep. Alexander placed his troops in their usual array: cavalry on the flanks and infantry in the center, with light infantry as a screen on the infantry flanks. The Companion cavalry deployed on the right, with the units to their left arrayed by order of performance. Alexander rated each unit after a battle and placed the best nearer him as a reward for bravery and an encouragement to the others. As they were marching onto the field, Darius quite openly shifted most of his cavalry from the hilly left side of the battlefield over to his right and massed them on the ocean flank. As the Macedonian cavalry opposite that force was small, Alexander ordered the Thessalian cavalry, some 1,500 strong, to shift to the left but to stay hidden behind the infantry on the left flank. Thus, the smaller cavalry force already deployed would serve as bait for a Persian cavalry attack, which could be stymied (if not defeated) by the hidden reserve.

  The steep banks along most of the river made an infantry attack difficult, as the soldiers in the phalanxes would have to disperse to cross the water and then climb. Archers covered the riverside. The only possible place for a cavalry maneuver on the eastern, upriver side of the battlefield was a narrow ford that was no more than thirty yards wide. Alexander grasped that this single feature would prove to be the key to the battle: Darius took his cavalry away from the crossing to reinforce the western flank, but Alexander saw the ford as sufficient for his needs.

  The battle took place in early November and began in middle to late afternoon. Once his men were in place, Alexander marched them ahead slowly, then finally rode across the front shouting words of encouragement. He returned to the Companion cavalry deployed on the Macedonian right, and indicated that the battle should begin. The phalanxes to his immediate left began their river crossing and found themselves faced not only with the river’s steep banks, but with the Greek mercenaries as well, the best infantry Darius had to offer. Fighting uphill into a veteran force was a virtually impossible task, and all the ancient sources comment on the fierce fighting, or, as John Keegan described it, “what must have been quite a prolonged, noisy, angry, fear-smelling bout of shoving and thrusting.”30 First-century AD Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus writes that once the infantry made contact the fighting became desperate. “Thus, obliged to fight hand-to-hand, they swiftly drew their swords. Then the blood really flowed, for the two lines were so closely interlocked that they were striking each other’s weapons with theirs and driving their blades into their opponents’ faces.”31 Alexander led the Companions across the river ford against minimal resistance and turned to strike the Persian flank. On the western flank the cavalry was fighting to a standstill, though the Persians were pressing the Greek cavalry hard.

  The battle at this point hung in the balance, until the Companions struck the Persian cardaces on the eastern flank. As they began to crumble, Alexander sighted Darius and drove directly for him. In hand-to-hand fighting between the two leaders, Alexander was wounded in the thigh. As Darius’s bodyguards fought to protect him, the horses pulling his chariot began to panic. Darius quickly dismounted, entered another chariot, and fled the battle. Alexander intended to give immediate chase, but the cavalry engagement on the seaward flank was beginning to go badly, so he continued to roll up the Persian line and rode to help Parmenio on the far end of the battlefield. Once Darius fled, the tribal levies deployed in the rear, which had not gotten into the fight, fled as well, leaving the mercenaries and cardaces to their fate.

  Darius’s decision to fight only on the defensive, while strategically sound, failed as the battle unfolded. Indeed, it was the strength of the position that ultimately was its weakness. It kept them from going on the offensive and attacking the seaward flank and countering the Macedonians, a move that, given their superior numbers, might have succeeded.

  There was also a psychological aspect to the Persian position. In his words to the troops before the battle, Alexander dismissed the enemy as being weak in spirit, just as they had been at the Granicus. He also realized that the longer he took before his army charged, the more time the enemy had to see what was coming and begin to worry. According to Arian, “Alexander sought to inspire dread in the ranks of the enemy who, he once again detected, were ‘trusting to the natural strength’ of the position rather than to their own courage.”32 It was the same point that, centuries later, George Patton would make in World War II when exhorting his men: if they have to hide behind strong defenses, it can only be because they’re scared of us.

  Alexander took an approach march to the Persian army, since he knew exactly where it was. Although he did not delay in deploying his men upon arrival, the attack was deliberate rather than hasty. He took in the Persian order of battle and immediately developed a plan to engage his entire force. Since Darius had chosen the ground and watched the Macedonians march onto the field, there was no element of surprise. Darius expected to control the tempo of the battle, keeping it purely defensive and expecting superior numbers to prevail, meaning the battle would be lengthy even though Alexander arrived and deployed in midafternoon. As in all his early great battles, Alexander knew exactly how and where to concentrate his forces: the Companions aimed at the weakest part of the enemy line, then at the enemy commander. The exploitation was not complete, as most of the rear ranks of the Persian army were able to escape the battlefield. Neither was there any serious pursuit, since Alexander was obliged to give up his chase for Darius in order to assist the hard-pressed Parmenio on the left flank. Although the surviving Persian cavalry fled, the best of Darius’s army, the mercenaries, were captured or killed.

  The Siege of Tyre

  THE VICTORY AT ISSUS WAS HARDLY the only example of Alexander’s tactical abilities. His next battle was a siege at the coastal city of Tyre, built on an island roughly a half mile offshore. Instead of pursuing Darius (as he would do later after), Alexander decided to negate the power of Persia’s navy by continuing to seize the ports along the eastern Mediterranean coast. With no place to land, the fleets would be ineffective and Alexander would not have to worry about maintaining a navy of his own. In the wake of the victory at Issus, some cities, such as Sidon, surrendered without a fight and were treated kindly. The first city to resist was Tyre, which had profited from an alliance with Persia. Alexander’s first contact with the city elders was innocuous enough: he merely wanted to worship the local gods in Tyre’s temples. When told the temples in Old Tyre on the mainland were just as good, Alexander knew the Tyrians would not be surrendering without a fight.

  At this point Alexander was obliged to acquire some ships in order to keep Persian ships from resupplying Tyre. Luckily for him, his victories up to this point had convinced many naval powers to come over to his side, and he soon had more than 200 ships available to him. He also began two projects that illustrate his skill at siegecraft as clearly as the Granicus and Issus battles displayed his mastery of open-battle tactics. First, he began the construction of siege engines such as ballistae and catapults aboard his newly acquired shipping. He also began a massive construction project, building a mole, or jetty, from the shore to the island city. Recent research in the form of a sediment study has shown that this effort, while unbelievably difficult given the technology of the time, was rendered somewhat easier by the existence of a sandbar, which he used as a foundation.33

  The rubble of Old Tyre and cedars of Lebanon from nearby forests supplied the materials needed to build the mole, which was almost five hundred feet wide. The Tyrians sent out individ
ual divers and launched surprise naval raids that did considerable damage to the mole, but Alexander persevered; he built towers to shoot arrows down on the walls of Tyre and at any approaching ships, while having his engineers build torsion catapults larger than had been known up to this time. It may have been a new design (Phoenician and Cypriot engineers arrived with their respective navies to assist him) or it may have been a larger version of the existing arrow-shooting catapult.34 His engineers built large cranes aboard ships to remove boulders at the base of Tyre’s walls. Once they were removed, ships with battering rams could anchor alongside them and start the destruction process—the only time in history city walls have been attacked by seaborne rams.

  After more than six months, the mole was completed and direct attack could commence. Direct assault against the walls, which were 150 feet high, proved impossible. Indeed, the walls around the city were so thick that rams and catapults were making little progress. Finally, a somewhat weaker section of wall was discovered along the southeastern part of the island and the siege engines began to show effect. As the bombardment continued, Alexander’s engineers built landing ramps so his soldiers could get direct access into the breach once it was created. On the day chosen for the assault, ships carrying infantry were sent all around the city, while other ships attempted to break into the two harbors on the island. Spreading the defense thin, Alexander faced a smaller (though still very determined) force when he led his men through the breach and into the city. Success in seizing the northern harbor also granted his forces access into the city, and soon the defenders were in a fighting withdrawal. Many women and children had taken refuge in the city’s temples, but Curtius wrote that “the men all stood in the vestibules of their own homes ready to face the fury of the enemy.… The extent of the bloodshed can be judged from the fact that 6,000 fighting-men were slaughtered within the city’s fortifications.”35

  The fall of Tyre had taken seven months, but solidified Alexander’s reputation. Henceforth no city would be considered safe from his army. This was not his first siege, for Alexander had captured the city of Thebes early in his consolidation of power and later had taken Miletus and Halicarnassus in Asia Minor. Here, however, he marshaled all resources and used many strategems. Alexander showed himself an inventive and adaptive tactician through his unprecedented use of ship-based battering rams, mechanical devices for building and defending the mole, and new or improved-upon catapults. He launched the first amphibious assault against fortifications in history, executed masterfully coordination and leadership of naval action, and displayed personal leadership once again at the forefront of the fighting, proving himself to be a truly great captain.

  Alexander’s Generalship

  THE MACEDONIAN KING WENT ON TO AN UNDEFEATED CAREER, leading his men to a decisive victory at the Battle of Gaugamela (also called the Battle of Arbela) over a Persian army hugely superior in numbers. His grand tactics at that battle mirrored what he had done at the Granicus and Pinaurus Rivers: find or create a hole in the enemy line near one flank, and punch his Companion cavalry through the hole with the enemy commander as his target. His infantry were there, as in the previous battles, to maintain control of the bulk of the enemy force in the front while he struck for his target behind the line he had just broken through. The Battle of Gaugamela secured his possession of the Persian Empire, and, seeking to expand his empire yet further, he marched his men into and through the Hindu Kush to India. There, he and his men faced an entirely new weapon, the war elephant, but Alexander defeated the Indian forces nonetheless. Although he failed in his ultimate personal goal of reaching the ends of the earth—such as they were known to him—and likewise failed in establishing either a Macedonian empire in the East or an Oriental-Greek society and government to last after his death, he certainly earned “the Great” that has followed his name for millennia for his battlefield exploits. In analyzing the Battle of Issus and the siege of Tyre, one can see Alexander’s mastery of many principles of war, particularly in the areas of objective, offensive, economy of force, and unity of command.

  At the Battle of Issus, although Darius outmaneuvered Alexander in the approach to the River Pinaurus, the position of the two armies relative to the lines of supply (while strategically significant) became secondary once the battle lines were forming. For Alexander, the objectives were the capture or killing of King Darius and the submission or destruction of Darius’s army. Although he failed in his first objective, he secured the second. This restored the strategic situation by reopening the line of communication.

  At Tyre, the objective was a weak point in the enemy walls. As with any attack on a fortified position, a commander has to find a point at which he can break through. The weakest point was not readily apparent at Tyre as it had been in Alexander’s set-piece battles, but once it was created he led the initial attack through it. Once he had his troops in the city, even though they could not use the phalanx for battle, the enemy’s lack of an avenue for escape spelled their doom.

  When it comes to the principle of seizing the offensive, Alexander excels. Although Alexander was obliged to retrace his steps to respond to the Persian seizure of Issus, once the two armies deployed at the Pinarus he initiated and dictated the pace of the battle. This is only logical, since Darius was in the great defensive position and would have been unwise to come out from behind it. Having located to his satisfaction the ford toward his right flank as the attack point, Alexander sent his infantry forward. This was not so much to break the Persian center as to keep it occupied while he led the cavalry to its rear.

  In the battle for Tyre, the Tyrians were obliged to play defense since they had nowhere to go, but they did conduct, as we have seen, an extremely active defense. This meant that while Alexander was building the mole and gathering a naval force, he, too, had to play defense to keep up the construction. He ultimately broke into the city and pushed the defenders through the streets and to their death. Alexander’s offense was constant.

  In neither of the battles, however, did Alexander employ the principle of mass in the traditional fashion. Normally, generals tried to hold down as much of the opposition army as possible with the fewest troops possible, in order to mass the bulk of their forces at the decisive point. For Alexander, the mass of his army was for a holding force rather than the arm of decision. Of the approximately 30,000 men he had at the Pinaurus River, the key to victory was the 2,500-man Companion cavalry, just as it had been at the Granicus. Alexander correctly divined the center of gravity as Darius, and forcing his flight from the battlefield was the key to victory. The rest of Alexander’s army was subservient to the Companions’ movement.

  The bulk of his force was committed to the final assault at Tyre, but against the entire length of the walls rather than at the point of attack in order to spread the Tyrian defense as much as possible. His force struck every section of the defense at once in order to allow him and his personally led infantry force to exploit the weak point in the city wall. That breakthrough, coupled with the secondary entrance into the city from the northern harbor, broke the will of the defense.

  Finally, Alexander’s unity of command was critical to his success. He seemed to know from the first look at the battlefield how exactly to deploy his men, how the enemy would move their men, and how to seize the opportunity the enemy would give him. From that initial grasp of the battlefield, he would lay out the plans for his subordinates, confident that they would perform their assigned roles. They had to, for once the battle began and the Companion cavalry went forward, it would have been possible for him to lead only those near him. Hence it was critical that the soldiers maintain discipline in their ranks, as well as their belief in Alexander’s plan of battle.

  The same could be said concerning the entrance into and the battle for Tyre. However, during the siege, while Alexander had the vision to see what had to be done, it can certainly be assumed that many of his tactical actions had to have been made with input from his engineers. Wit
hout them, his ideas could not have been manifested in weaponry and invention. He told them what he needed, they told him if it could be done, then they did it.

  ALEXANDER BROUGHT TO ALL his victories an uncanny ability to see from the outset of the battle exactly where the enemy’s weakness lay. By striking that point with his strongest unit, the Companion cavalry, his initial success caused a psychological as well as physical break in the enemy force. Once the panic set in, it was impossible to stop. Although Alexander was unable to capture Darius at Issus or Gaugamela, the fact was that Alexander chose him as his ultimate target—the breakthrough elsewhere was but a preliminary. While Darius certainly made some very good strategic moves, and his reputation for bravery before becoming king was exemplary, seeing his own massive army broken by a smaller one was too much for him to face.

  Alexander kept his army honed to a fine edge by drawing on a national pastime of one-upmanship. In his book Soldiers and Ghosts, J. E. Lendon describes how Alexander kept all the units in the army in competition with one another by placing them in ranks, from right (the commander’s position of honor) to left, based on their performance in battle. He knew how intent his soldiers were on gaining not just victory but glory, so his prebattle addresses pointed out individuals for their past bravery. This singling out of valor in front of the entire army was the highest possible honor in a time before the awarding of medals for heroism. As king and commander, of course, he had to show himself the most valorous.

  Few generals in history put themselves in harm’s way as often as did Alexander. He was in the thick of the fighting from his first major battle at Chaeronea under his father’s command, and he never backed down. Probably no example of his bravery outdoes his action at the siege of Multan in India. Believing his men to be too slow in scaling the walls, he seized a ladder himself and climbed to the ramparts. His aides were close behind him but no sooner had they reached the top than their ladder broke, leaving Alexander and just a few men alone in the midst of the city garrison. Alexander never stopped swinging his sword until brought down by an arrow. Luckily for him, his men followed his example and swarmed over the walls in time to save him and ultimately capture the town. Soldiers in any time or place will follow a man who shows he would not ask of them anything he would not also ask of himself.