The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The Enemy with a Thousand Faces

  Some enemies are not just formidable but abjectly terrifying. Before the victory at Marathon, the Greeks, or so the historian Herodotus remarked, feared even to look upon the Persians. Rumors of the decapitation of the Spartan king Leonidas at Thermopylae perhaps only added to the sense of dread that hung over the defeated Greeks who retreated to Salamis. The chronically outnumbered Byzantines likewise felt such apprehension about their myriad fierce tribal enemies such as the Goths, Vandals, and Huns, and an array of Persian and Arab enemies to the east, whom bribes, not force, usually alone had warded off. By 1864, a growing number in the demoralized North were beginning to believe the myth that the South simply had bred a better warrior class, one so adept at arms that it still might nullify the vast advantages in technology, numbers, and supply enjoyed by the North. Many feared that no Northern generals could match Confederate luminaries like Robert E. Lee. In Korea, the sudden influx of hundreds of thousands of Communist Chinese created sheer panic among retreating American troops. Sudden tales of “hordes” of fanatical supermen who in eerie fashion blew trumpets and baited their enemies on loudspeakers quickly spread among demoralized United Nations troops. After hundreds of Americans were blown up by Shiite and Sunni Muslim extremists in Iraq, many in America felt there were simply few antidotes either to suicide bombers or to improvised explosive devices—the trademarks of a premodern enemy that bragged it loved life far less than the more comfortable postmodern Americans.

  What is remarkable in all these cases was how little such dread affected generals like Themistocles, Belisarius, Sherman, Ridgway, and Petraeus. They did not belittle their enemies’ fighting prowess, but simply saw that their own side’s prior problems were not due to larger-than-life foes, but to deficiencies in their own forces. In other words, a Sherman or Ridgway did not really worry about the martial reputations of their enemies, only about ensuring that their own forces were so well trained, motivated, and organized that they could defeat any conceivable adversary. Themistocles’ sailors who rowed in the Bay of Salamis that day believed they could beat back any armada—whether the Great King’s or not. What did it count whether Ionians, Egyptians, or Phoenicians served in the king’s fleet? For Belisarius, once he had created a successful Byzantine way of war, it did not matter whether he employed it against Persians, Arabs, Vandals, Goths, or Huns.

  A great general peels the veneer of invulnerability from a winning enemy, and he does so by convincing his own men that victory is entirely within their own purview. In short, the problem is never seen as a particular adversary, only an army’s sense that enemies are abstractions, given that victory or defeat is always fluid, never fated. By the time Uncle Billy’s army took Atlanta, it no longer resembled the tentative force that had left Tennessee five months earlier, but felt that it could march through the South with impunity and itself win the war outright. The Chinese of spring 1951 were as terrified of the Americans as the American forces that Ridgway inherited in December 1950 had been of the Chinese as they crossed the Yalu.

  Grand Strategy

  Superior generalship can save an army. But to infuse it with a sense of victory, generals convince their armies that they will not just defeat the enemy, but do so in a fashion that will ripple far beyond the theater. The sailors at Salamis were not just fighting Xerxes, but were themselves emissaries of a new sea power that would help decide the entire Persian War. Belisarius’ men were not just defending the borders of Byzantium, but at some point sensed that they were the instruments of a larger vision of their general and emperor in restoring a lost Roman Empire in the west. Sherman’s men did not just take Atlanta before the election, but in attacking the infrastructure of the Confederacy were determined to “make war so terrible” that the Southern population would prefer peace, and to make the supplier of arms as legitimate a target at the rear as was the user at the front. Ridgway pushed the Communists out of South Korea. In the process, he taught the West that it could fight and win a distant limited conventional war in the age of nuclear annihilation. Before Petraeus quieted Iraq, “counterinsurgency” was an abstraction to most of the American people; afterward, the public believed their sons and daughters could defeat far-off insurgents on American terms.

  These generals saw their tasks as transcending the immediate war. They were not just to beat the enemy on a particular day, or even during a given campaign, but also to craft a means that would defeat the enemy to the point of winning the war, and thereby to provide a blueprint for others to do so as well. After Petraeus left Iraq, counterinsurgency was accepted as the means for the remaining Americans to keep Iraq quiet. Sherman introduced to the American way of war the idea that targeting the enemy’s morale and material reserves should not be confined to the front—with devastating consequences in the century to follow. Themistocles created the Athenian fleet and the way to use it successfully; even those who despised him saw that his vision might found an Athenian empire.

  Savior generals were fine writers and skilled communicators, advocates of causes much larger than merely defeating an enemy on the field of battle. Petraeus is an accomplished author. So was Ridgway, who drew on history to inform his key decisions in Korea. Sherman’s memoirs, letters, and communiqués show a level of insight superior even to Grant’s. Themistocles seems to have mastered the Athenian Assembly well before he did the navy.

  War on All Fronts

  The savior generals saw civilians as key to their victories. For David Petraeus, the aim was not just to kill the enemy, but rather to persuade (or hire) both Sunni and Shiite tribesmen to turn on the insurgents and terrorists in their midst. That also meant persuading everyday Iraqis that neither foreigners like the Americans and their allies nor rival religious groups posed as much of a threat to their own safety as did radical Islamists in their own environs. His predecessors either did not fully grasp that fact or were so overwhelmed by the endemic violence that they had neither the time nor the resources to win over the population.

  Matthew Ridgway found himself in a civil war, in which he had to fight alongside South Koreans against North Koreans and their Communist Chinese allies—at a time when all Koreans were puzzled that the United States was an apparent ally of the hated Japanese, and almost all Americans back home were tired of Asia in general. Rebuilding Korea went on even as Ridgway was often destroying it.

  William Tecumseh Sherman operated mostly in hostile territory after May 1864. For all the contemporary disparagement of him as a “terrorist,” Sherman was savvy enough to target mostly the houses of the wealthy and the infrastructure of the Confederacy while sparing the lives of Southern noncombatants. Yet there was an important qualifier: he would make war so terrible to the architects of the Confederacy that the deleterious effects would trickle down to even average Southerners who were often exempt from Sherman’s direct ire.

  Belisarius and his small army could not have overthrown the Vandal kingdom without convincing North Africans that his invaders were restorers rather than conquerors. At any given time in the east, in Africa, or in Sicily and Italy, Belisarius would have lost the war had the indigenous population turned against him.

  Themistocles took an entire people to war by evacuating Athens, not just seamen in the fleet. Sherman insidiously targeted the manifest symbols of Southern wealth and authority—plantations and Confederate buildings—as he sought to remind the mostly poor and non-slave-owning local populations that he was not their real enemy. Ridgway was careful to remind Koreans that their common enemy was Communism, not other Koreans per se in the north. Petraeus knew of these lessons, and so he assumed that Iraq would not be quiet until those he protected from insurgents joined in to protect his forces as well—despite vast differences in nationality, religion, and language.

  Two common themes emerge. As far as the civilian populations are concerned, generals won their hearts and minds not by rhetoric or reprisals, but by convincing locals that they had much to lose by further opposition—a
nd far more to gain through cooperation. As for the military, it was always to be seen as a fish that had to swim and breathe in a civilian sea.

  Saved—but Not Won?

  The title of this book is not The Victorious Generals, although all five profiles most surely deal with victories. Nonetheless, Salamis was the beginning of the end for the Persians, not the end—a final Greek victory to be won only at Plataea a year later where Themistocles played no part. Persia was quieted, never conquered, by the fifth-century Greeks. An exiled Belisarius was not in Italy when Narses finally pacified the peninsula. It was Grant, not Sherman, who accepted Lee’s surrender in Virginia. Ridgway never fulfilled MacArthur’s vaunted aim of reuniting Korea—and was in Europe when the war finally ended. David Petraeus was gone from Iraq when the last American troops left the country, and he remained almost mute about the prospects of the country’s uncertain future as violence returned.

  In all these cases, the aims of the savior commanders were limited. Their role was to restore a theater, to give other generals and politicians the opportunity to recover victory or at least avoid defeat. Because The-mistocles was not an Alexander, Belisarius not a Caesar, and Sherman not a Napoleon, taking over an entire war and ensure that it stayed won, both militarily and politically, was beyond their responsibilities. Matthew Ridgway resurrected a nearly lost South Korea; whether UN forces could or should have moved across the 38th Parallel in a second invasion was ultimately left to President Dwight Eisenhower and the Joint Chiefs. David Petraeus saved Iraq; but after December 2011, when the last American troops left, it was up to Iraqis themselves and the Obama administration to protect a nascent constitutional government. At the death of Belisarius, Byzantium controlled most of the Mediterranean—to be preserved or forfeited by subsequent generations.

  Magnanimity

  Savior generals did not fault the prior generals who had nearly lost the war. Instead, a Themistocles or a Ridgway praised predecessors whose ideas were ensuring defeat, even as they quietly proceeded to reject their methods of war making. Sherman gave much credit to predecessors even as he adopted policies antithetical to theirs. David Petraeus said nothing much that was critical of his predecessors General Ricardo Sanchez or General George Casey. It was the genius of Matthew Ridgway that he found a way to reject the tactics and strategy of Douglas MacArthur even as the latter took credit for what to the outside observer should have been seen as rebuke.

  Such magnanimity in turn allowed even greater leeway for needed radical innovation. Colleagues became invested in the success of the maverick, whose failures were his alone and whose successes were to be shared by others. In 2004, burly General Ray Odierno was unfairly caricatured by the media as “Old Army” and a practitioner of unimaginative shoot-’em-up tactics that had helped lead to open insurgency in Baghdad. By 2007, during his second deployment, he was reinvented as the newly appointed General Petraeus’s right-hand man and considered an adept practitioner of the sophisticated arts of counterinsurgency. “Modest and humble” were the adjectives the historian Edward Gibbon saw as key to Belisarius’ success. The same adjectives apply to the thinking of all the savior generals, who, despite their undeniable egos, were careful to share the laurels that they had largely won on their own. To read Sherman’s letters is to appreciate his serial disavowals of envy of Grant. In the moments when he was deified, he credited Grant; when Grant was unfairly criticized, he took the blame himself. The famous quote by Sherman about Grant reflected Sherman’s magnanimity: “He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk; and now, sir, we stand by each other always.”

  Soldiers’ Generals

  The savior generals were amateur sociologists of a sort, too. They understood concepts such as national character and what their own forces were best—and worst—at. As leaders of constitutional societies, they knew especially the constraints of public patience. The people were for or against the war not solely on ideological or political grounds, but more often as a result of perceptions of losing or winning—given that an unsuccessful war was inevitably to be costly to the people themselves, whether in higher taxes, lost loved ones, fewer entitlements—or moral outrage. Unpopular wars turned popular with quick victories—but devolved into sure defeat with continued stalemate. In democracies, then, time in war was of the essence; in consensual societies, the desire to bring the troops home begins the moment they leave for the front.

  That incessant demand for rapid success in turn required aggressive tactics—Themistocles challenging the Persian fleet, Sherman methodically driving into Georgia to capture Atlanta before the election of 1864, Ridgway upon arrival in Korea demanding that his division commanders offer plans for offensives, and Petraeus surging in Iraq. Many mediocre generals ultimately come to distrust, if not despise, the politicking of their civilian superiors; savior generals usually understood and dealt with the public constraints that limited their overseers’ options. They are, after all, creatures of politics, sent in to win back public approval.

  Note here the key role of spouses—sources of support that were often underappreciated—Antonia probably kept Belisarius from Justinian’s executioners on more than one occasion. Sherman would never have received a second chance at Shiloh had his influential, rich, and savvy wife, Ellen Ewing, not politicked on his behalf and restored her husband’s sinking spirits—going so far as to meet with Lincoln himself. By all accounts, Ridgway at last found happiness with his young, beautiful wife, Penny. And Holly Knowlton Petraeus was not just a general’s wife, but also an informed and trusted confidante, a daughter of a general who probably knew as much about the politics of the U.S. army as her husband—a role that the media did not fully appreciate when Petraeus was engulfed in postbellum extramarital scandal. If it is critical for a savior general to be a contrarian, such independence is made far easier when he has a loyal—and connected—spouse.

  Regardless of their class upbringing or the exalted status of their rank, savior generals adopted the profile of an egalitarian on the battlefield to lead by example. No Persian could distinguish Themistocles from any other trireme commander at Salamis. Sherman was scruffier than most of his subordinate officers. Ridgway, with live grenade and medical kit hung on his chest, was indistinguishable from a sergeant. Petraeus out of camouflage appeared aberrant. None had the look of a plumed Alexander or Napoleon.

  All this was contrived—but not wholly contrived. A savior general really was a man of action. He looked restless, appeared to relish combat, and was as vigorous and often as warlike as his men. Petraeus often challenged officers and enlisted men half his age to outrun or outexercise him. Sherman’s mess was as crude as his soldiers’. If such generals were to ask their men to take new risks to salvage victories, then they must be willing to share the ensuing dangers, and, like a Sherman or Ridgway, appear almost indistinguishable from the men they led. It was no accident that Themistocles, Belisarius, Sherman, Ridgway, and Petraeus on almost any day of their commands could easily have been killed, so close were they to the front and so unconcerned were they for their personal safety.

  Retreat into the Shadows

  Unexpected successes won these visionaries public acclaim. But they also raised their stature from minor theater commanders almost overnight into national political figures—often with unfortunate personal results. Such radical change in fortunes often clouded perceptions of why these contrarians had been suspect in the first place for most of their careers, and thus perhaps explains why in the calm of peace their reexamined lives would so often end in controversy and sometimes in unhappiness. Many, after all, were reckless and had difficult personalities, large egos, and eccentric habits that became once again apparent in peace after having gone largely unremarked in the context of war. One can be as uncomfortable in public life as he is adroit on the battlefield. David Petraeus’s resignation from the directorship of the CIA, in a scandal that originated in a Gmail account, was perhaps simply a twenty-first-century version of the controversie
s that surrounded Themistocles, Belisarius, and Sherman when they left the battlefield and navigated tumultuous postwar careers. Themistocles and Belisarius, remember, both faced trials on capital charges. Ridgway had a long retirement; and if it was scandal free, it was also marked by serial controversies

  Democracy can be unkind to successful military commanders—but especially unkind when the conditions of peace encourage collective amnesia about how close a victorious nation had come to military debacle. America was not only shocked that Curtis LeMay ran as vice president on the George Wallace ticket in 1968, but had forgotten as well LeMay’s prior heroic career as a World War II Army Air Force general who shortened the war and saved thousands of American lives. By 2010, David Petraeus was no longer so readily associated with the ever more distant salvation of Iraq in 2007–2008. By 2011, as CIA director, a retired General Petraeus could say little as the Obama administration for whom he worked pulled the last U.S. troops from Iraq. Sherman spent much of his postwar years engaged in constant feuds with former Union comrades and Confederate enemies who repeatedly charged him with preferring warring against civilians rather than soldiers—calling their criticism “bottled piety” possible only after others had secured the peace. When President Dwight Eisenhower pressured Ridgway into retirement in 1955, the public assumed that their heroic president had good reason.