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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The only other constant besides the fault line of mostly non-West versus West conflict is a vague sense of chronology, beginning with the ancient world and ending in the modern age, starting with spears and concluding with jets. This emphasis on classical antiquity is deliberate: while most historians admit of a European dominance in arms from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, fewer profess that since its creation the West has enjoyed martial advantages over its adversaries—or that such dominance is based not merely on superior weaponry but on cultural dynamism itself. The landmark battles do not reflect radical evolutionary changes in war making through the centuries. While Western warfare grew more sophisticated and deadly over time, its main tenets were well established during classical antiquity. Consequently, all our examples reflect a commonality in military practice: freedom of expression, for instance, was integral to the Greek cause at our first battle, Salamis, and characteristic of the American army at our last example, Tet, some 2,500 years later. I shall argue that what led to the present Western superiority in arms (“Part Three: Control”) was not fundamental alteration and improvement in the classical military paradigm (“Part One: Creation”) but rather its gradual spread throughout Europe and the Western hemisphere (“Part Two: Continuity”). This issue of cultural heritage is a controversial but critical historical point, with fundamental consequences for the future, because it suggests that Western lethality shall continue, despite even the proliferation of advanced technology into the non-West.

  Critics might seek more examples of Western reverses. Yet even horrific individual disasters like Carrhae (53 B.C.) did not affect the ultimate superiority of Western forces. Parthia is beyond the Euphrates, and the legions who died there thousands of miles from home comprised only a fifth of Rome’s available military manpower. Adrianople (378) and Manzikert (1071) were horrendous Western defeats; but the Romans and Byzantines who were slaughtered there were for the most part vastly outnumbered, far from home, poorly led, and reluctant emissaries of crumbling empires. Some might ask, “Where is Dien Bien Phu?,” forgetting that the Vietminh defeated the French in Vietnam, not in France, with Western-designed artillery, rockets, and automatic weapons, not arms indigenous to Southeast Asia—and as patriots with ample Chinese aid defending their fatherland, not as colonial troops without clear support from home. In Oran, Afghanistan, Algiers, Morocco, and India, outnumbered Spanish, French, and British troops were sometimes annihilated—usually surrounded, without logistical support, and opposed by numerically superior opponents making use of European firearms.

  For every Isandhlwana, where vastly outnumbered and poorly commanded Westerners were surprised and slaughtered by indigenous troops, there is a Rorke’s Drift, where 139 British soldiers held off 4,000 Zulus. Can we envision the opposite—a handful of Zulus butchering thousands of rifle-carrying redcoats? In any case, both the slaughter of British troops and the killing of Zulus do not in any way nullify a general truth that European armies fought Africans with superior weapons, logistics, organization, and discipline, and thereby overcame the vast numerical advantages and remarkable courage of their enemies. All such wars against the Zulus were fought in Africa—it was surely impossible that the latter could even contemplate an invasion of England. When the Zulu king Cetshwayo wished to go to London, it was as a defeated curiosity, dressed in suit and tie, to delight and shock Victorian society.

  IDEAS OF THE WEST

  Western Preeminence?

  Behind the economic and political hegemony of the West has stood the peculiar force of Western arms, past and present. Militarily, the uniforms of the world’s armies on both sides of the modern battle line are now almost identical—Western khaki, camouflage, and boots are worn when Iraqis fight Iranians or Somalians battle Ethiopians. Companies, brigades, and divisions—the successors to Roman military practice—are the global standards of military organization. Chinese tanks look European; African machine guns have not evolved beyond American models; and Asian jets have not incorporated new propulsion systems with a radically novel Korean or Cambodian way of producing thrust. If a Third World autocrat buys weapons from China, India, or Brazil, he does so only because these countries can copy and provide Western-designed weapons more cheaply than the West itself. Indigenous armies in Vietnam and Central America have had success against Europeans—but largely to the degree that they were supplied with automatic weapons, high explosives, and ammunition produced on Western specifications.

  A small school, it is true, has argued that non-European forces were in no way inferior to Western armies. But examination of such case studies of European setbacks—in the Pacific, Africa, Asia, and the Americas— reveals consistent and recurring themes. Europeans were more often outnumbered and fighting outside Europe. If defeated, their victors were usually employing some type of European weaponry; and rarely did Western battle defeats lead to capitulation and armistice. Only a few places in Africa and Asia—Nepal, Tibet, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia—resisted European entry. Others that did—Japan most notably—emulated Western military practice almost entirely. After Thermopylae, and with the exception of the Moors in Spain and Mongols in eastern Europe, there is virtually no example of a non-Western military defeating Europeans in Europe with non-European weapons. That European colonial armies sometimes found themselves vastly outnumbered, often opposed by courageous indigenous warriors equipped with Western firearms, and then were annihilated tells us little about Western military weakness.

  Sometimes critics of the idea of Western military predominance point to the easy transference of technology in arguing that, say, American natives became better shots than European settlers or that Moroccans quickly mastered Portuguese artillery. Such arguments have the paradoxical effect of proving the opposite of what is intended: Englishmen were in the New World and selling guns to natives, not vice versa. Moroccans were not in Lisbon teaching Portuguese the arts of indigenous Islamic heavy gunnery. Here the human quality of utilizing, mastering, and improving a tool is confused with the cultural question of providing an intellectual, political, and social context for scientific discovery, popular dissemination of knowledge, practical application, and the art of mass fabrication.

  As we shall see with Carthage and Japan, the very controversial question of Westernization has a reductionist and sometimes absurd quality about it: there is no military concept of “Easternization” within the armed forces of the West, at least in which entire Western cultures adopt wholesale the military practices and technology of the non-West. Meditation, religion, and philosophy are not the same as industrial production, scientific research, and technological innovation. It matters little where a weapon was first discovered, but a great deal how it was mass-produced, constantly improved, and employed by soldiers. Few scholars, however, can disconnect the question of morality from energy. Thus, any investigation of why the military of the West has exercised such power is far too often suspect of cultural chauvinism.

  Nature Over Culture?

  Is Western hegemony a product of luck, geography, natural resources, or itself a late phenomenon due largely to the discovery and subsequent conquest of the New World (1492–1700) or to the Industrial Revolution (1750–1900)? Many cite the West’s natural and geographical benefaction. In this line of thinking—made most popular by Fernand Braudel and most recently by Jared Diamond—the West’s apparent “proximate” advantages in technology like firearms and steel are due largely to more “ultimate” causes that are largely accidental. For example, the Eurasian axis favored a long crop season, a different sort of animal husbandry, and species diversity. The resulting rise in urban population and animal domestication created a lethal brew of germs that would decimate outsiders without long-standing exposure and ensuing biological immunity. European topography both prevented easy access by hostile nomads and promoted rival cultures, whose competition and warring led to constant innovation and response. Europe was blessed with abundant ores that made iron and steel production possible, and so on.
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  Natural determinists are to be congratulated in their efforts for the most part to dismiss genes. Europeans were not by any means naturally smarter than Asians, Africans, or the natives of the New World. They were not genetically dumber either—as Jared Diamond, the purportedly natural determinist, has unfortunately hinted at. In an especially disturbing reference to racial intelligence, Diamond argues for the genetic inferiority of Western brains:

  New Guineans . . . impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people than the average European or American. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. (J. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 20)

  One wonders what would have been the response of critics had Diamond juxtaposed the words “New Guineans” and “Europeans.” Are we to believe that Columbus lacked the brain function to make a “mental map” of unfamiliar surroundings in an empty ocean?

  The efforts of those who seek to reduce history to biology and geography deprecate the power and mystery of culture, and so often turn desperate. While Chinese civilization did give the world gunpowder and printing, it never developed the prerequisite receptive cultural environment that would allow those discoveries to be shared by the populace at large and thus freely to be altered and constantly improved by enterprising individuals to meet changing conditions. This rigidity was not because of “China’s chronic unity,” or a result of a “smooth coastline” and the absence of islands, but because a complex set of conditions favored imperial autocracy that became entrenched in a natural landscape not at all that different from the Mediterranean.

  In contrast, Rome, whose continuous rule was comparable in duration to many of the dynasties of imperial China, was an especially innovative empire, which drew strength from its unity and nearly four centuries of tranquillity. Despite the general anti-utilitarian nature of classical science, the Romans developed and then dispersed among millions of people sophisticated building techniques with cement and arches, screw presses and pumps, and factories to produce bulk supplies of everything from arms and armor to dyes, woolen cloth, glass, and furniture, as the government had little control over the dissemination or use of knowledge. The Greeks likewise found even greater power vis-à-vis other cultures during the Hellenistic period, when their national armies devastated the East. Hellenistic applied science under the Successor dynasties made practical strides unknown during the classical period when Greece was composed of over a thousand squabbling and autonomous polities. Political unity outside of China has brought other cultures advantages as well as atrophy. Neither the geography nor the political history of China alone accounts for its culture.

  We must remember also that farmland in America is as rich as Europe’s—and gave many New World palatial dynasties prosperity. China, India, and Africa are especially blessed in natural ores, and enjoy growing seasons superior to those of northern Europe. True, Rome and Greece are situated in the central Mediterranean and thus were a nexus of sorts for traders arriving from Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa—but so was Carthage, whose location was as fortunate as Rome’s. The fact is we shall never know the precise reasons why Western civilization in Greece and Rome developed so radically on a diverse path from its neighbors to the north, south, and east, especially when the climate and geography of Greece and Italy were not especially different from those of ancient Spain, southern France, western Persia, Phoenicia, or North Africa.

  In this most recent sort of biological determinism, natural advantages like irrigated arable land in the Fertile Crescent or expansive plains in Persia and China encourage political unity, which is a “bad” thing, while climatological and geographical adversity lead to war and fighting, which is ultimately good. Yet the East possesses no uniform geography—who indeed can sort out the differing characteristics of a small isolated valley in Greece from its nearly identical counterpart in Persia or China? Modern biologists have unknowingly returned to the Greeks’ crude historical determinism, the theories of Hippocrates, Herodotus, and Plato that asserted the harsh Greek mainland made Hellenes tough, even as the bounty of Persia enervated its population.

  Few ancient societies, in fact, were situated in a more disadvantageous position than Greece, neighbor to a hostile Achaemenid empire of 70 million, directly north of the warring states of the Near East, with less than half its land arable, without a single large navigable river, cursed with almost no abundance of natural resources other than a few deposits of gold, metals, and timber, its coastline vulnerable to the Persian fleet, its northern plains open to migrating nomads from Europe and southern Asia, its tiny and vulnerable island polities closer to Asia than Europe. Are we then to blame its mountains, which discouraged vast hydraulic farming and contained few riches, or commend the rocky terrain for ensuring political fragmentation that led to innovation? The old Victorian idea that Greece wore itself out with internecine killing is now to be replaced by the popular biological notion that such natural diversity led to “rivalry” that gave the West the advantages of embracing innovation.

  Grain harvests in Ptolemaic Egypt (305–31 B.C.) reached astounding levels of production. Far from an exhausted Nile valley ending the power of the Egyptian dynasties, it bloomed as never before under Greek and Roman agricultural practice. If the pharaohs were doomed because of the disadvantages of nature and an exhausted soil, the Ptolemies who walked their identical ancient ground most assuredly were not—Alexandria, in a way Karnak could not be, for nearly five hundred years was the cultural and economic hub of the entire Mediterranean. How was that possible when thousands of prior harvests should have exhausted the Nile basin for Greek colonialists? Why did not the pharaohs utilize the great delta of Alexandria to create an emporium on the Mediterranean to facilitate trade between Asia, Europe, and Africa? Clearly, culture in Egypt—not geography, not weather, and not resources—had changed from 1200 to 300 B.C.

  Vast cultural changes could also occur not only in the same place but among the same people. Mycenaean Linear B of the thirteenth century B.C. was a clumsy, largely pictographic script used by a small cadre to record royal inventories; the Greek language of the seventh century B.C. was widely disseminated and facilitated philosophy, science, literature, and poetry. Obviously, the climate, geography, and animals of central Greece did not mutate all that much in five hundred years. What allowed a written language in mainland Greece to evolve so differently from others elsewhere in the Mediterranean and from past Hellenic civilization was a radical revolution in social, political, and economic organization. Mycenaeans and polis Greeks lived in exactly the same place and spoke roughly the same language, but their respective values and ideas were a world apart. The biology and the environment of Greece may explain why both cultures farmed olive trees, herded sheep, relied on stone, mud brick, and tiles for construction materials, and even had the same words for mountains, cow, and sea, but it does not explain the vast difference between Mycenaean state agriculture and the family farms of the polis— much less why classical Greek militaries were far more dynamic than those of the earlier palaces.

  No one denies the great role that geography, climate, and natural history play in history—Scandinavians obviously developed ideas of time, travel, and war different from the natives of Java. The absence of horses ensured that the Incas and Aztecs would lack the mobility of their Spanish adversaries. Yet the fact is that the ancient civilizations of the Near East, India, China, and Asia often encompassed for long periods of time areas of similar latitude, climate, and terrain as the West, with more or less the same advantages and disadvantages in resources and location. Land, climate, weather, natural resources, fate, luck, a few rare individuals of brilliance, natural disaster, and more—all these play their role in the formation of a distinct culture, but it is impossible to determine exactly whether man, nature, or c
hance is the initial catalyst for the origins of Western civilization. What is clear, however, is that once developed, the West, ancient and modern, placed far fewer religious, cultural, and political impediments to natural inquiry, capital formation, and individual expression than did other societies, which often were theocracies, centralized palatial dynasties, or tribal unions.

  A Late Ascendancy?

  Others have argued that the rise of Western military power is relatively late and a quirk of either the spread of gunpowder (1300–1600), the discovery of the New World (1492–1600), or the Industrial Revolution (1750–1900), dismissing the possibility of cultural continuity from Greece and Rome that might explain why there was a military or industrial revolution in Europe and not in Egypt, China, or Brazil. As is true of any civilization, there have been wide swings in the influence of the West, from a Dark Ages from A.D. 500 to 800, to a relatively isolated and somewhat backward era between 800 and 1000, when Europeans fought off the invasions of northern and eastern nomads and Muslims. Yet two points need to be stressed about the notion of a rather late Western military dominance in arms that is characterized largely by technological superiority. First, for nearly a thousand years (479 B.C. to A.D. 500) the military dominance of the West was unquestioned, as the relatively tiny states in Greece and Italy exercised military supremacy over their far larger and more populous neighbors. The scientific, technological, political, and cultural foundations of classical culture were not entirely lost, but passed directly from the Roman Empire to European kingdoms or were rediscovered during the Carolingian period and later the Italian Renaissance.