Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  In some form or another, the Ten Thousand would be followed by equally brutal European intruders: Agesilaus and his Spartans, Chares the mercenary captain, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and centuries of legionary dominance, the Crusaders, Hernán Cortés, Portuguese explorers in Asiatic seas, British redcoats in India and Africa, and scores of other thieves, buccaneers, colonists, mercenaries, imperialists, and explorers. Most subsequent Western expeditionary forces were outnumbered and often deployed far from home. Nevertheless, they outfought their numerically superior enemies and in varying degrees drew on elements of Western culture to slaughter mercilessly their opponents.

  In the long history of European military practice, it is almost a truism that the chief military worry of a Western army for the past 2,500 years was another Western army. Few Greeks were killed at Marathon (490 B.C.). Thousands died at the later collisions at Nemea and Coronea (394 B.C.), where Greek fought Greek. The latter Persian Wars (480–479 B.C.) saw relatively few Greek deaths. The Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) between Greek states was an abject bloodbath. Alexander himself killed more Europeans in Asia than did the hundreds of thousands of Persians under Darius III. The Roman Civil Wars nearly ruined the republic in a way that even Hannibal had not. Waterloo, the Somme, and Omaha Beach only confirm the holocaust that occurs when Westerner meets Westerner.

  This book attempts to explain why that is all so, why Westerners have been so adept at using their civilization to kill others—at warring so brutally, so often without being killed. Past, present, and future, the story of military dynamism in the world is ultimately an investigation into the prowess of Western arms. Scholars of war may resent such a broad generalization. Academics in the university will find that assertion chauvinistic or worse—and thus cite every exception from Thermopylae to Little Big Horn in refutation. The general public itself is mostly unaware of their culture’s own singular and continuous lethality in arms. Yet for the past 2,500 years—even in the Dark Ages, well before the “Military Revolution,” and not simply as a result of the Renaissance, the European discovery of the Americas, or the Industrial Revolution—there has been a peculiar practice of Western warfare, a common foundation and continual way of fighting, that has made Europeans the most deadly soldiers in the history of civilization.

  THE PRIMACY OF BATTLE

  War as Culture

  I am not interested here in whether European military culture is morally superior to, or far more wretched than, that of the non-West. The conquistadors, who put an end to human sacrifice and torture on the Great Pyramid in Mexico City, sailed from a society reeling from the Grand Inquisition and the ferocious Reconquista, and left a diseased and nearly ruined New World in their wake. I am also less concerned in ascertaining the righteousness of particular wars—whether a murderous Pizarro in Peru (who calmly announced, “The time of the Inca is over”) was better or worse than his murdering Inca enemies, whether India suffered enormously or benefited modestly from English colonization, or whether the Japanese had good cause to bomb Pearl Harbor or the Americans to incinerate Tokyo. My curiosity is not with Western man’s heart of darkness, but with his ability to fight—specifically how his military prowess reflects larger social, economic, political, and cultural practices that themselves seemingly have little to do with war.

  That connection between values and battle is not original, but has an ancient pedigree. The Greek historians, whose narratives are centered on war, nearly always sought to draw cultural lessons. In Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, nearly 2,500 years ago the Spartan general Brasidas dismissed the military prowess of the tribes of Illyria and Macedonia, who confronted his Spartan hoplites. These men, Brasidas says of his savage opponents, have no discipline and so cannot endure shock battle. “As all mobs do,” they changed their fearsome demeanor to cries of fright when they faced the cold iron of disciplined men in rank. Why so? Because, as Brasidas goes on to tell his soldiers, such tribes are the product of cultures “in which the many do not rule the few, but rather the few the many” (Thucydides 4.126).

  In contrast to these enormous armies of screaming “barbarians” without consensual governments and written constitutions—“formidable in outward bulk, with unbearable loud yelling and the frightful appearance of weapons brandished in the air”—“citizens of states like yours,” Brasidas assures his men, “stand their ground.” Notice that Brasidas says nothing about skin color, race, or religion. Instead, he simplistically connects military discipline, fighting in rank, and the preference for shock battle with the existence of popular and consensual government, which gave the average infantryman in the phalanx a sense of equality and a superior spirit to his enemies. Whether or not we wish to dismiss Brasidas’s self-serving portrait of frenzied tribesmen as a chauvinistic Western “construct” or “fiction,” or debate whether his own Spartan oligarchy was a broad-based government, or carp that European infantrymen were often ambushed and bushwhacked by more nimble guerrillas, it is indisputable that there was a tradition of disciplined heavy infantrymen among the constitutionally governed Greek city-states, and not such a thing among tribal peoples to the north.

  In an analysis of culture and conflict why should we concentrate on a few hours of battle and the fighting experience of the average soldier— and not the epic sweep of wars, with their cargo of grand strategy, tactical maneuver, and vast theater operations that so much better lend themselves to careful social and cultural exegesis? Military history must never stray from the tragic story of killing, which is ultimately found only in battle. The culture in which militaries fight determines whether thousands of mostly innocent young men are alive or rotting after their appointed hour of battle. Abstractions like capitalism or civic militarism are hardly abstract at all when it comes to battle, but rather concrete realities that ultimately determined whether at Lepanto twenty-year-old Turkish peasants survived or were harpooned in the thousands, whether Athenian cobblers and tanners could return home in safety after doing their butchery at Salamis or were to wash up in chunks on the shores of Attica.

  There is an inherent truth in battle. It is hard to disguise the verdict of the battlefield, and nearly impossible to explain away the dead, or to suggest that abject defeat is somehow victory. Wars are the sum of battles, battles the tally of individual human beings killing and dying. As observers as diverse as Aldous Huxley and John Keegan have pointed out, to write of conflict is not to describe merely the superior rifles of imperial troops or the matchless edge of the Roman gladius, but ultimately the collision of a machine-gun bullet with the brow of an adolescent, or the carving and ripping of artery and organ in the belly of an anonymous Gaul. To speak of war in any other fashion brings with it a sort of immorality: the idea that when hit, soldiers simply go to sleep, rather than are shredded, that generals order impersonal battalions and companies of automatons into the heat of battle, rather than screaming nineteen-year-olds into clouds of gas and sheets of lead bullets, or that a putrid corpse has little to do with larger approaches to science and culture.

  Euphemism in battle narrative or the omission of graphic killing altogether is a near criminal offense of the military historian. It is no accident that gifted writers of war—from Homer, Thucydides, Caesar, Victor Hugo, and Leo Tolstoy to Stephen Runciman, James Jones, and Stephen Ambrose—equate tactics with blood, and strategy with corpses. How can we write of larger cultural issues that surround war without describing the way in which young men kill and die, without remembering how many thousands are robbed of their youth, their robust physiques turned into goo in a few minutes on the battlefield?

  We owe it to the dead to discover at all costs how the practice of government, science, law, and religion instantaneously determines the fate of thousands on the battlefield—and why. During the Gulf War (1990–91) the designer of an American smart bomb, the assembler in its plant of fabrication, the logistician who ordered, received, stockpiled, and loaded it onto a jet, all functioned in a manner unlike their
Iraqi opposites—if there were such exact counterparts—and so ensured that an innocent conscript in Saddam Hussein’s army would find himself blown to pieces with little chance to escape the attack, display heroism in his demise, or kill the pilot who killed him. Why Iraqi adolescents were targets in the flashing video consoles of sophisticated American helicopters, and not vice versa, or why GIs from icy Minnesota were better equipped to fight in the desert than recruits from nearby sweltering Baghdad, is mostly a result of cultural heritage, not military courage, much less an accident of geography or genes. War is ultimately killing. Its story becomes absurd when the wages of death are ignored by the historian.

  The “Great Battles”

  The idea of studying arbitrary “decisive battles” has fallen into disrepute—classic studies like Sir Edward Creasy’s The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, Thomas Knox’s Decisive Battles Since Waterloo, or J. F. C. Fuller’s Decisive Battles of the World: From Salamis to Madrid. Such compendiums once sought to show how the course of civilization rested on a successful charge or two in a given landmark battle—those acts of individual cowardice, bravery, and luck that Creasy called “human probabilities,” which warred with larger “causes and effects” or the determinist currents that he called “fatalism.”

  The Great Battles were also selected as worthwhile objects of moral and ethical study. “There is,” Creasy admitted in his preface, “undeniable greatness in the disciplined courage, and in the love of honor, which makes the combatants confront agony and destruction” (vii). Battles bring out the coward or hero in all of us. The nineteenth-century logic was that there is no better way to form our character than through reading of the heroism and cowardice inherent in fighting of the past. At first glance, it is hard to argue with either of Creasy’s premises that single battles change history and offer timeless moral instruction. Had Themistocles not been present at Salamis, the Greeks in the vulnerable infancy of Western civilization may well have been defeated and then subjugated as the westernmost satrapy of Persia, with catastrophic results for the subsequent history of Europe. Likewise, we can learn the lessons of martial audacity by reading of the frightening charge of Alexander’s phalangites at Gaugamela, or the price of folly in Livy’s account of the Roman command at Cannae. Yet I wish to take up again this nineteenth-century genre of the Great Battles for an entirely different purpose from either uncovering pivotal hours in history or posturing about the gallantry of war. There is also a cultural crystallization in battle, in which the insidious and more subtle institutions that heretofore or were murky and undefined became stark and unforgiving in the finality of organized killing.

  No other culture but the West could have brought such discipline, morale, and sheer technological expertise to the art of killing than did the Europeans at the insanity of Verdun—a sustained industrial approach to slaughter unlike even the most horrific tribal massacre. No American Indian tribe or Zulu impi could have marshaled, supplied, armed—and have killed and replaced—hundreds of thousands of men for months on end for a rather abstract political cause of a nation-state. The most gallant Apaches—murderously brave in raiding and skirmishing on the Great Plains—would have gone home after the first hour of Gettysburg.

  By the same token, there was little chance that the American government in the darkest days of December 1941—Britain on the ropes, the Nazis outside Moscow, the Japanese in the air over Hawaii—would have ordered thousands of its own naval pilots to crash themselves into Admiral Yamamoto’s vast carrier fleet or commanded B-17s to plunge into German oil refineries. After Hasdrubal’s catastrophic setback at the Metaurus, there was no likelihood that the Carthaginian Assembly, as Rome had done after the far worse slaughter at Cannae, would have ordered a general muster of all its able-bodied citizenry—a real nation-in-arms arising to crush the hated resurgent legions. In battle alone we receive a glimpse of the larger reasons precisely why and how men kill and die that are hard to disguise and harder still to ignore.

  About a century ago, Creasy wrote of Alexander’s victory at Gaugamela that it “not only overthrew an Oriental dynasty, but established European rulers in its stead. It broke the monotony of the Eastern world by the impression of Western energy and superior civilization, even as England’s present mission is to break up the mental and moral stagnation of India and Cathay by pouring upon and through them the impulsive current of Anglo-Saxon commerce and conquest” (E. Creasy, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, 63). Nearly everything in that statement is false—except for one indisputable phrase: “Western energy.” England was in India, India not in England. Alexander’s brigands were hardly emissaries of culture, and went east to loot and plunder, not to “civilize.” But they killed without dying because of a military tradition that for centuries prior had proved unlike any other in the ancient world, itself the product of a different social, economic, and political culture from Achaemenid Persia.

  The nine engagements chosen for this book were not selected solely because the fate of civilizations has hinged on their outcomes—although in the instance of Salamis, Gaugamela, and the siege at Mexico City that surely was the case. Nor have I chosen these battles because of their unusual heroism and gallantry—ethical instruction in which we are supposed to appreciate or dismiss people’s moral fiber or national character itself as well. Although an army’s organization, discipline, and arms can surely magnify or whittle down the martial spirit of a man, bravery nonetheless is a more universal human characteristic, and so tells us little about the singular lethality of a particular people’s military or its culture at large. Europeans were intrinsically no smarter or braver than the Africans, Asians, and Native Americans whom they usually butchered. The Aztec warriors who were blown to bits by Cortés’s cannon or the Zulus who were shattered by British Martini-Henry rifles at Rorke’s Drift may have been the most courageous fighters in the history of warfare. The brave American pilots who blew up the Kaga at Midway were no more gallant than the brave Japanese who were engulfed in its flames below.

  I am also unable to offer universal military “lessons”; there are no anatomies here of tactical blunders that doomed an entire army—unwise battles like Kursk that ruined the German Panzers in Russia, or Varus’s ill-thought expedition into Germany that resulted in thousands slaughtered and essentially ended the chance that Germany might be incorporated into the Roman Empire. True, there is something to this idea of a timeless “art of warfare” that transcends the centuries and continents, and so is innate to man in battle, rather than specific to culture: concentration of force, the proper use of surprise, or the necessity of safe lines of supply and so on. Yet most such books on battle knowledge have already been written. In most of their efforts at universal truths of how wars are won and lost, they often fail to appreciate the cultural baggage with which an army enters the battlefield.

  Instead, I have selected these collisions for what they tell us about culture, specifically the core elements of Western civilization. They are “landmark” for what they reveal about how a society fights, not necessarily because of their historical importance. The battles are snapshots of a cultural tradition of war making, not progressive chapters in a comprehensive history of Western warfare. Not all are European victories. Cannae, for example, was a horrific Roman defeat, Tet an American political embarrassment. Nor are all these engagements clear-cut clashes between Western and non-Western forces. We can learn just as much about the phenomenon of Westernization from militaries like Carthage, imperial Japan, and the North Vietnamese, which all adopted in some part elements of Western battle practice and weaponry that accordingly gave them advantages on the battlefield unmatched by their African and Asian neighbors—and that eventually resulted in their ability to kill thousands of Westerners themselves. In this regard, there must be some common strand that explains why Darius III had Greeks in his employment, why the Ottomans transferred their capital city to the newly conquered European Constantinople, why Zulus used Martini-Henry rifles at
Rorke’s Drift, why the Soryu looked something like the Enterprise at Midway, and why an AK-47 and M-16 appear almost identical. The opposite was not true: Alexander did not hire the Immortals; the Crusaders did not transfer the capital of France or England to a conquered Tyre or Jerusalem; the British did not outfit regiments with assegais; and the American navy did not institute samurai sword training.

  In an effort to identify common and recurring themes, I have sought diversity in the broadest sense: battle at sea, in the air, and on land; battle in the New World, on the Mediterranean and the Pacific, and in Europe, Asia, and Africa; battles that were both relatively small and also huge; battles like Midway that were pivotal and others like Rorke’s Drift that were ultimately irrelevant; battles between colonists and aborigines, or states against empires, or religion against religion. I have also attempted to illustrate Western characteristics of war in their most unlikely occurrence: the value of civic militarism at Cannae when a mercenary army demolished the militia of Rome; the supremacy of landed infantry during the so-called Dark Ages of purported Western impotence when the mounted knight alone was thought to rule the battlefield; the singularity of Western technology and research among the conquistadors, who were products of the Inquisition and the Reconquista; the superiority of Western discipline against the Zulus, Africa’s most disciplined and well organized indigenous army; and the value of dissent and self-critique during the Tet Offensive, when clear military victory on the battlefield was turned into defeat by a sometimes overzealous opposition. It is easy to see that civic militarism or landed infantry saved the West at Plataea, that the militaries of England, France, and Germany embodied the excellence of Western technologies, and that colonial armies were better disciplined than Pacific islanders. Yet we can learn more of the resilience of Europe and its culture from these worst-case scenarios in which the Western way of war at first glance seems hardly dynamic at all, if at times counterproductive to the struggle for victory itself.