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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  The critical point about firearms and explosives is not that they suddenly gave Western armies hegemony, but that such weapons were produced in quality and great numbers in Western rather than in non-European countries—a fact that is ultimately explained by a long-standing Western cultural stance toward rationalism, free inquiry, and the dissemination of knowledge that has its roots in classical antiquity and is not specific to any particular period of European history. There is also something radically democratic about firearms that explains their singularly explosive growth in the West. Guns destroy the hierarchy of the battlefield, marginalizing the wealthy mailed knight and rendering even the carefully trained bowman ultimately irrelevant. It is no accident that feudal Japan eventually found firearms revolutionary and dangerous. The Islamic world never developed the proper tactics of shooting in massed volleys to accompany weapons that were so antithetical to the idea of personal bravery of the mounted warrior. The effective use of guns requires the marriage of rationalism and capitalism to ensure steady improvement in design, fabrication, and production, but in addition an egalitarian tradition that welcomes rather than fears the entrance of lethal newcomers on the battlefield.

  Even after the fall of the Roman Empire, the West, purportedly now backward and far inferior to the cultures of China and the Islamic world, was militarily strong far beyond what its population and territory would otherwise indicate. During the so-called Dark Ages, the Byzantines mastered the use of “Greek fire” that allowed their fleets to overcome the numerical superiority of Islamic armadas—as, for example, the victory of Leo III in 717 over the far larger Islamic fleet of the caliph Sulaymān. The European discovery of the crossbow (ca. 850)—it could be fabricated more rapidly and at cheaper cost than more deadly composite bows—allowed thousands of relatively untrained soldiers the ready use of lethal weapons. From the sixth to the eleventh centuries the Byzantines maintained European influence in Asia, and no Islamic army after the early tenth century again ventured into western Europe. The Reconquista was slow, but steady and incremental. The fall of Rome in some sense meant the spread of the West much farther to the north as Germanic tribes became settled, Christianized, and more Western than ever before.

  The dramatic European expansion of the sixteenth century may well have been energized by Western excellence in firearms and capital ships, but those discoveries were themselves the product of a long-standing Western approach to applied capitalism, science, and rationalism not found in other cultures. Thus, the sixteenth-century military renaissance was a reawakening of Western dynamism. It is better to call it a “transformation” in the manifestation of European battlefield superiority that had existed in the classical world for a millennium and was never entirely lost even during the darkest days of the Dark Ages. The “Military Revolution,” then, was no accident, but logical given the Hellenic origins of European civilization.

  We should not expect to see precisely in Greek freedom, American liberty; in Greek democracy, English parliamentary government; or in the agora, Wall Street. The freedom that was won at Salamis is not entirely the same as what was ensured at Midway, much less as what was at stake at Lepanto or Tenochtitlán. All ideas are in part captives of their time and space, and much of ancient Greece today would seem foreign if not nasty to most Westerners. The polis would never have crafted a Bill of Rights; in the same manner, we would not turn our courts over to majority vote of mass juries without the right of appeal to a higher judiciary. Socrates would have been read his Miranda rights, had free counsel, never have testified in person on his own behalf, been advised to plea-bargain, and when convicted would have been free on bail during years of appeal. His message, which seemed radical to his Athenian peers, would strike us as reactionary in the extreme. The key is not to look to the past and expect to see the present, but to identify in history the seeds of change and of the possible across time and space. In that sense, Wall Street is much closer to the agora than to the palace at Persepolis, and the Athenian court akin to us in a way pharaoh’s and the sultan’s law is not.

  THE WESTERN WAY OF WAR

  The West has achieved military dominance in a variety of ways that transcend mere superiority in weapons and has nothing to do with morality or genes. The Western way of war is so lethal precisely because it is so amoral—shackled rarely by concerns of ritual, tradition, religion, or ethics, by anything other than military necessity. We should not be held captive by technological determinism, as if the tools of war appear in a vacuum and magically transform warfare, without much thought of either how or why they were created or how or why they were used. Even the monopoly of superior Western technology and science has not always been true—Themistocles’ triremes at Salamis were no better than Xerxes’, and Admiral Nagumo’s carriers at Midway had better planes than the Americans did. The status of freedom, individualism, and civic militarism at those battles, however, was vastly different among the opposing forces. As these encounters reveal on nearly every occasion, it was not merely the superior weapons of European soldiers but a host of other factors, including organization, discipline, morale, initiative, flexibility, and command, that led to Western advantages.

  Western armies often fight with and for a sense of legal freedom. They are frequently products of civic militarism or constitutional governments and thus are overseen by those outside religion and the military itself. The rare word “citizen” exists in the European vocabularies. Heavy infantry is also a particularly Western strength—not surprising when Western societies put a high premium on property, and land is often held by a wide stratum of society. Because free inquiry and rationalism are Western trademarks, European armies have marched to war with weapons either superior or equal to their adversaries, and have often been supplied far more lavishly through the Western marriage of capitalism, finance, and sophisticated logistics. By the same token, Europeans have been quick to alter tactics, steal foreign breakthroughs, and borrow inventions when in the marketplace of ideas their own traditional tactics and arms have been found wanting. Western capitalists and scientists alike have been singularly pragmatic and utilitarian, with little to fear from religious fundamentalists, state censors, or stern cultural conservatives.

  Western warring is often an extension of the idea of state politics, rather than a mere effort to obtain territory, personal status, wealth, or revenge. Western militaries put a high premium on individualism, and they are often subject to criticism and civilian complaint that may improve rather than erode their war-making ability. The idea of annihilation, of head-to-head battle that destroys the enemy, seems a particularly Western concept largely unfamiliar to the ritualistic fighting and emphasis on deception and attrition found outside Europe. There has never been anything like the samurai, Maoris, or “flower wars” in the West since the earliest erosion of the protocols of ancient Greek hoplite battle. Westerners, in short, long ago saw war as a method of doing what politics cannot, and thus are willing to obliterate rather than check or humiliate any who stand in their way.

  At various periods in Western history the above menu has not always been found in its entirety. Ideas from consensual government to religious tolerance are often ideal rather than modal values. Throughout most of Western civilization there have been countless compromises, as what was attained proved less than what Western culture professed as the most desirable. The Crusaders were religious zealots; many early European armies were monarchical with only occasional oversight by deliberative bodies. It is hard to see in Cortés’s small band religion and politics as entirely separate. Not a phalangite in Alexander’s army voted him general, much less king. During the sixth to ninth centuries A.D. there is little evidence that Western forces always enjoyed absolute technological superiority over their foes. German tribesmen were ostensibly as individualistic as Roman legionaries.

  Yet, abstract ideas must often be seen in the context of their times: while Alexander’s Macedonians were revolutionaries who had destroyed Greek liberty, there was no esca
ping their ties with the Hellenic tradition. That shared heritage explains why soldiers in the phalanx, commanders in the fields, and generals at Alexander’s table all voiced their ideas with a freedom unknown in the Achaemenid court. While the Inquisition was an episode of Western fanaticism and at times unrestrained by political audit, the tally of its entire bloody course never matched the Aztec score of corpses in a mere four days at the Great Temple to Huitzilopochtli in 1487. Even on the most controversial of issues like freedom, consensual government, and dissent, we must judge Western failings not through the lenses of utopian perfectionism of the present, but in the context of the global landscape of the times. Western values are absolute, but they are also evolutionary, being perfect at neither their birth nor their adolescence.

  In any discussion of military prowess, we should also be clear about the thorny divide between determinism and free will. Throughout this study, we are not suggesting that the intrinsic characteristics of Western civilization predetermined European success on every occasion. Rather, Western civilization gave a spectrum of advantages to European militaries that allowed them a much greater margin of error and tactical disadvantage—battlefield inexperience, soldierly cowardice, insufficient numbers, terrible generalship—than their adversaries. Luck, individual initiative and courage, the brilliance of a Hannibal or Saladin, the sheer numbers of Zulu or Inca warriors—all on occasions could nullify Western inherent military superiority.

  Over time, however, the resiliency of the Western system of war prevailed, allowing horrible disasters like Thermopylae (480 B.C.), Lake Trasimene (217 B.C.), la Noche Triste (1520), Isandhlwana (1879), and Little Big Horn (1876) not to affect the larger course of the conflict or to lead to an overall Western collapse. Western armies often owed their prowess to brilliant and savage individuals like Alexander the Great, Scipio Africanus, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Richard the Lion-Hearted, and Hernán Cortés, as well as to now nameless gallant individuals: the right wing of Spartans at Plataea (479 B.C.), the veterans of Caesar’s Tenth Legion in Gaul (59–51 B.C.), or the heavy knights at Arsouf (1191), whose battlefield conduct, along with chance and enemy blunders, often changed the course of the battle.

  Yet much of what courageous Westerners accomplished must be seen in an overall cultural landscape that afforded them inherent military advantages not usually shared by their adversaries. We must be careful not to judge the record of Western military skill in absolute terms, but always in a relative context vis-à-vis the conditions of the times: scholars can argue over the effectiveness of Western arms, the impressive power of Chinese and Indian armies, the occasional slaughter of European colonial forces, but in all such debate they must keep in mind that non-European forces did not with any frequency and for long duration navigate the globe, borrowed rather than imparted military technology, did not colonize three new continents, and usually fought Europeans at home rather than in Europe. Although important exceptions should always be noted, generalization—so long avoided by academics out of either fear or ignorance—is indispensable in the writing of history.

  As examination of these battles shall show, throughout the long evolution of Western warfare there has existed a more or less common core of practices that reappears generation after generation, sometimes piecemeal, at other times in a nearly holistic fashion, which explains why the history of warfare is so often the brutal history of Western victory—and why today deadly Western armies have little to fear from any force other than themselves.

  PART ONE

  Creation

  TWO

  Freedom—or “To Live as You Please”

  Salamis, September 28, 480 B.C.

  “O sons of Greece, go forward! Free your native soil. Free your children, your wives, the images of your fathers’ gods, and the tombs of your ancestors! Now the fight is for all that.”

  —AESCHYLUS, The Persians (401–4)

  THE DROWNED

  IT MUST BE a terrible thing to drown at sea—arms thrashing the waves, lungs filling with brine, the body slowly growing heavy and numb, the brain crackling and sparking as its last molecules of oxygen are exhausted, the final conscious sight of the dim and fading, unreachable sunlight far above the rippling surface. By day’s end in late September 480 B.C., a third of the sailors of the Persian fleet were now precisely in those awful last moments of their existence. A few miles from the burned Athenian acropolis as many as 40,000 of Xerxes’ imperial subjects were bobbing in the depths and on the waves—the dead, the dying, and the desperate amid the wrecks of more than two hundred triremes. All were doomed far from Asia in the warm coastal waters of the Aegean, all destined for the bottom of the Saronic Gulf. Their last sight on earth was a Greek sunset over the mountains of Salamis—or their grim king perched far away on Mount Aigaleos watching them sink beneath the waves. Unlike battle on terra firma, where lethality is so often predicated on the technology of death, and not the landscape of battle itself, war at sea is a primordial killer of men, in which the ocean itself can wipe out thousands without the aid of either man or his weapons. At Salamis most died from water in their lungs, not steel in their bodies.

  Originally either a Phoenician or an Egyptian invention, an ancient trireme in battle was a rowing, not a sailing, ship. Usually, 170 sailors powered the vessel. An additional crew of thirty or so marines, archers, and helmsmen crowded above on the decks. Unlike the oarsmen in later European galleys, rowers sat in groups of three, one on top of another, each one pulling a single oar of a standard length. The great strength of the trireme’s design was its extraordinary ratio between weight, speed, and propulsion. The sleekness of the ship and the intricate arrangement of the oarsmen made it possible for two hundred men in a few seconds to reach speeds of nearly nine knots. That quickness and agility ensured that its chief weapon—a two-pronged bronze ram fitted at the waterline of the prow—could smash right through any ship on the seas. So complex was the ancient design of vessel, oar, and sail that in the sixteenth century when Venetian shipwrights attempted to duplicate the Athenian method of oarage, the result was mostly unseaworthy galleys. Modern engineers have still not mastered the ancient design, despite the use of advanced computer technology and some 2,500 years of nautical expertise.

  The trireme was also a fragile and vulnerable heavily laden craft that put two hundred men out in the open water with little margin of safety— the oar ports of its bottom bank of rowers were a mere few feet above the waterline. Unlike modern naval warfare, ancient ships offered scarcely any time for the crew to evacuate. Most capsized almost instantaneously when rammed in battle, since even a glancing blow could send water rushing into the ship and quickly toss the crew into the sea. The sailors’ only hope was to make for land or to grab on to any debris that remained floating from the wreckage. For rowers and marines who could not swim—and such unfortunates were numerous in the ancient world and nearly without exception in the Persian fleet—death by drowning would come in seconds. It mattered little that most crews were not shackled like sixteenth-century galley slaves, since triremes could turn over or fill with water without much warning. The long robes of the Persians only made things worse. The playwright Aeschylus, who was probably a veteran of Salamis, eight years later wrote of their helplessness in the water: “The corpses of the Persian loved ones, soaked with saltwater, were often submerged and tossed about lifeless in their long robes” (Persians 274–76).

  Their burial water between the island of Salamis and the Attic mainland was a small strait, not much more than a mile wide. Like most great sea battles of the preindustrial age, the respective fleets fought in sight of land. The battle, involving more than 1,000 triremes, took place in only about a square mile of sea, ensuring that the dead littered the ocean surface and washed up on the surrounding coast. Aeschylus recalls that “the shores of Salamis and all the neighboring coast are full of the bodies of men who perished by a wretched fate” (Persians 272–73).

  Thousands of Egyptians, Phoenicians, Cilicians, and a
ssorted Asians were washed up on the shores of Salamis and Attica, a few marooned on the wrecks of what was left of two hundred ships. Greek sailors finished off the dying at sea with javelins and arrows. At the same time, heavy hoplite infantrymen scoured the beaches of Salamis harpooning the few stranded survivors. Despite Aeschylus’s claim that “the entire armada has perished,” hundreds of fleeing Persian ships managed to row past the carnage to safety, too terrified of the ordered lines of pursuing Greek triremes to pick up their kindred. The Athenian architect of the victory, the admiral Themistocles, after the battle purportedly walked along the shore viewing the remains, and invited his men to plunder the gold and silver from the Persian corpses. According to Aeschylus, the bodies were lacerated by the surf and grotesquely gnawed by marine scavengers.

  Salamis—the name is still synonymous with abstract ideals of freedom and “the rise of the West”—is not associated with a bloodbath. Although no battle better deserves such an association, references to the battle disasters during the Persian Wars evoke images of the final Spartan contingent at Thermopylae (480 B.C.), which was wiped out to the man, King Leonidas, the leader of the famous 299 Spartans, decapitated and his head impaled on a stake—or the Persians at Plataea (479 B.C.), who were butchered mercilessly by Spartan hoplites and sent fleeing into the croplands of Boeotia. Yet at least two hundred imperial ships were rammed and sunk at Salamis. Most went down with their entire crews of two hundred rowers and auxiliaries, ensuring that at least 40,000 sailors drowned and countless others were captured or killed as they washed up onshore. Because the strait of Salamis is so narrow and the Persian armada was so large—somewhere between 600 and 1,200 ships—the dead were unduly conspicuous and made a ghastly impression on the Persian king, Xerxes, who viewed the battle from the nearby Attic heights.