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

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Discipline likewise proved to be a major fault line between America and its adversaries. Thus far in the war, no American troops have surrendered; thousands of Taliban soldiers and hundreds of al Qaeda terrorists gave themselves up. Allied setbacks were exclusively among our Northern Alliance proxies during the first few days of the war. Much has been written of the suicidal devotion of the al Qaeda terrorists, but so far in the war such fanaticism has not offered any widespread advantages on the battlefield. The real dangerous killers are American soldiers—who risk their lives to retrieve the bodies of fellow fighters captured and executed by the enemy—not terrorists in caves. Group discipline, unit cohesion, and strict adherence to orders allowed the Americans to kill hundreds of the enemy for each soldier lost. There is an eerie echo of Rorke’s Drift in all this. As during the Somali incursion—made famous by the book and subsequent film Black Hawk Down—Americans found themselves in distant landscapes, amid difficult terrain, and opposed by superior numbers of enemies who desperately wished to kill them at all costs. And as in the past, the very manner in which American soldiers fought as a closely disciplined group allowed them to inflict enormous casualties upon their foes.

  A distinctive individualism has also been manifest throughout the war. Frightening new weapons—whether updated versions of “Daisy-Cutters” or novel thermobaric bombs—reflect the near instantaneous ability of individual soldiers, scientists, and manufacturers to devise new responses to new challenges. Just as the damaged Yorktown was repaired and rushed back into the fight at Midway, so too, after September 11, new tactics, such as on-site direction of satellite-guided munitions, and weapons were created to be adopted, modified, or rejected by individuals as the situation on the ground mandated rather than by distant governmental decree.

  Domestic dissent was evident immediately after September 11, whether on the extreme fringe that suggested that America’s world role might have warranted attack or in more moderate criticism over the wisdom and practicality of fighting such an elusive enemy, one that had adeptly identified itself with the aspirations of one billion Muslims. In the midst of the war, vocal dissidents on campus and in the media complained openly about an array of issues—the morality of a military response itself, collateral bomb damage, the detention of Middle Easterners in the United States, treatment of detainees in Cuba, and the President’s identification of an “axis of evil” in North Korea, Iran, and Iraq. So far even the most virulent criticism of the American government has not hampered military operations in the field. If such open public audit of, and disagreement over, military action have not always directly aided our soldiers, that critique is likely to have at least forced our armed services to be aware that every aspect of their operations will be subject to well-publicized scrutiny. Some Republicans label Democratic critics as unpatriotic; in turn, some Democrats call Republicans saber-rattlers with a lust for unending war; and out of that conundrum eventually arises a consensus in the middle, the beneficiary of both patriotic zeal and principled dissent. In the long run, I believe that this heated debate will do far more good than harm.

  Carnage and Culture was reviewed in a wide variety of newspapers, journals, and magazines, and discussed often on television and radio, here and abroad. The tragic events of September 11 gave the book a contemporary relevance, which might well have not occurred otherwise. The book’s thesis of cultural rather than environmental factors at once set it at odds, for example, with Jared Diamond’s recent Guns, Germs, and Steel, and the two of us subsequently debated on National Public Radio the rise and dominance of the West. Clearly I do not believe that we are waging a successful war against terrorism either because of America’s own favorable physical environment or the ancient Greeks’ past natural advantages over their neighbors.

  In general the critical reaction to the book has been very positive— despite the occasional uneasiness by professors with the rather sweeping claim that history shows that Westerners fight and kill their adversaries more effectively than those drawing on other cultural traditions. Academics, of course, are by nature wary about such grand claims. And in the case of Carnage and Culture, specialists in fields as diverse as ancient history, medieval studies, the Spanish Conquest, the Renaissance Mediterranean, British imperial studies, and American history were surprised to see their own fields tied directly with practices of other diverse locales and eras. Military historians—such as John Keegan, Geoffrey Parker, and Dennis Showalter—wrote enthusiastically about the book; and a number of magazines and newspapers—the Wall Street Journal, Military History Quarterly, American Heritage, National Review—often requested that I periodically amplify the book’s views in the context of the current war.

  The only real skepticism voiced about the book’s conclusions was from an entirely unexpected source. In the United Kingdom, Carnage and Culture was published under the title Why the West Has Won, thereby incurring the wrath of a number of journalists and historians writing in progressive magazines and newspapers such as the New Statesman, Independent, and Manchester Guardian, who felt my conclusions reflected a peculiarly American attempt to gloat over the contemporary military superiority of the United States. One peeved reviewer wrote that the book was a “WASP” apology—even though Greeks, Romans, Spaniards, and Italians were neither Anglo-Saxons nor Protestants, and a third of the book’s case histories involved the pre-Christian world of the southern Mediterranean.

  So I have learned that the book is often seen as controversial in the present crisis, at least if hundreds of letters and electronic communications from both the scholarly community and the public at large are any indication. Some have expressed relief after reaching the book’s conclusion of continued Western prowess. As one reader put it, “I am convinced now that we can really win this present war.” Privately, a number of scholars have written and spoken to me about the book’s premise of Western military superiority along lines of something like the following, “Of course, it is true, but you know that we are not supposed to say that.” Others simply send me a flood of minutiae, with references to obscure battles and weapons that would substantiate, modify, or reject my thesis—as if nine representative battles from some 2,500 years of military history could in any way be exhaustive in matters of detail.

  As I write, rumors of wars to come in Iraq, Somalia, and Iran circulate, as the American assault against terrorists continues. All such potential conflicts—fought, as they will be, far from home—involve frightening logistical problems, an array of enemies, and unsure support from our NATO allies. Yet it is my belief that if the United States chooses to fight a war felt necessary by its leadership and supported by its populace, then it is very likely that it will win and win decisively. History teaches us that the chief fear of a Western power is another Western power, and on the immediate horizon I see little chance that the United States will be fighting Europe or a westernized Russia or Japan in the next few months.

  Yet one recurring reaction from readers stays with me, one also wholly unforseen. Both scholars and the reading public have a general sense that the book is persuasive about conclusions it draws from the past, both in its argument and research, but nevertheless express a sense of unease about the future. Few seem to grasp that the military situation for the West is far brighter now than what once faced Themistocles in the bay of Salamis or poor Don Juan on the deck of the La Reale. It is almost as if with greater power comes greater Western insecurity; at a time of unprecedented global influence, Americans appear to express less confidence in their culture’s morality and capabilities than did Greeks, Romans, and Italians at the point of near extinction. If that ignorance about our contemporary strength is as widespread as it seems, then the final premise of Carnage and Culture—that the chief danger of Western militaries is not their weakness, but their unmatched power to kill—remains the most germane and yet most unrecognized lesson of our current conflict.

  VDH

  Selma, California

  March 10, 2002

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sp; Glossary

  Achaemenid: The royal ruling house of the Persian Empire between 557 and 323 B.C.

  anabasis: Greek for “march up-country”; also the title of works by the historians Xenophon and Arrian, chronicling the respective marches into Asia by the Ten Thousand and Alexander the Great.

  ARVN: Army of the Republic of Vietnam—the military of the South Vietnamese government.

  assegai: The short Zulu spear, equipped with a large metal head, and to be used for thrusting rather than throwing.

  Attica: The hinterland and civic territory surrounding the city of Athens.

  Aztecs: The people who lived in Aztlán (“white place of the herons”), located around Tenochtitlán; used as a synonym for the more generic term “Mexicas,” the residents of the Aztec empire in central Mexico.

  Boers: European colonists in South Africa, originally of Dutch descent.

  boulē: Usually the upper body of legislative government of most Greek city-states.

  Bushido: “The way of the warrior”—the purported code of the samurai, an amalgam of values championed by the Japanese military shortly before World War II, and drawing on elements of Zen Buddhism, Japanese feudalism, and the fascism of the 1930s.

  Byzantine: Generally, the civilization of the Eastern Roman Empire that gradually developed an exclusively Greek culture after the foundation of Constantinople in A.D. 330; the Byzantines kept the traditions of the Roman Empire alive in a Greek context for a thousand years until their destruction in 1453.

  caudillo: Spanish for “leader”; used often in the context of the sixteenth-century Caribbean and Mexico, where for a generation or two Spanish conquistadors and governors exercised near absolute power.

  centurions: The chief professional officers of the Roman legion, who each managed a century of about a hundred soldiers. Under the reforms of the early republic, there remained sixty centurions per legion, but six were assigned to each of the ten cohorts, the new principal tactical units of the Roman army.

  Companion Cavalry: The veteran heavy cavalrymen who anchored the wings of Alexander the Great’s army and served as the aristocracy of Macedonian society.

  consuls: The two annually elected executive officers of the Roman Republic, entrusted with enforcing the decrees of the Senate and leading large armies into battle.

  Dark Ages: A chronological term referring to the period in western Europe between A.D. 500 and 1000, in which the collapse of institutions after the fall of the Roman Empire led to a dearth of information about the subsequent five hundred years of European history.

  devshirme: The Ottoman inspection every four years of conquered Christian provinces to select suitable Christian youths for forced conversion to Islam and eventual entry into Ottoman public service.

  DMZ: Demilitarized Zone, the official border between North and South Vietnam established by the peace accords of 1954; purportedly to be immune from military operations by either side; in fact, the scene of some of the most violent fighting in the Vietnam War.

  ekklēsia: The assembly of all voting citizens in most Greek city-states.

  eleutheria: The ancient Greek word for political freedom.

  galleass: A large hybrid galley of three sails, high sides, and plentiful cannon; used haphazardly as a Mediterranean warship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  galleon: A large sailing vessel with multiple sails and three or four decks, used for both commerce and war on the high seas between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  galley: A large oared vessel of a single sail with unusually low sides, used on the Mediterranean as a warship from Roman times to the end of the sixteenth century.

  galliot: A small, fast galley, which often had two sails and relied on both oars and wind.

  Gatling gun: An early machine gun that achieved high rates of fire through rotating barrels on a central axis turned by a crank.

  gladius: The short Roman sword of the legionary, over two inches wide and two feet long, used for both cutting and thrusting, and thought to have been adapted from an earlier Spanish weapon.

  grapeshot: Clusters of small iron balls shot out of cannon as antipersonnel projectiles.

  harquebus: An early matchlock musket, often requiring a barrel rest to support its great weight.

  Hellenic: Literally “Greek”; often used to describe the period of Greek history between 700 and 323 B.C.

  Hellenistic: An era of eastern Mediterranean history between the death of Alexander the Great (323 B.C.) and the Roman victory at the battle of Actium (31 B.C.).

  hidalgos: Minor impoverished Spanish nobility, mostly Castilians, Andalusians, and Extremeños, who as conquistadors sailed to the New World to find fortune, celebrity, and renewed social status.

  hoplite: A Greek heavy infantryman, who fought with body armor, large shield, and spear in mass formation. The term originally denoted the agrarian class of the Greek city-states, who could afford the necessary panoply, but eventually referred to any soldier who fought in the phalanx.

  hypaspists: “Shield bearers,” infantrymen of the Macedonian army, with large shields and short spears, who provided flexible defense between the Companion Cavalry and the phalanx proper.

  Immortals: Select infantrymen who comprised the imperial guard of the Achaemenid empire and whose numbers remained constant at 10,000.

  impi: A generic term for the assembled Zulu army, but more regularly an individual Zulu regiment.

  jihad: A religious war of Muslims against perceived enemies of Islam.

  kraal: A small Zulu hamlet surrounded by a rough stockade; also used of a cattle enclosure and, in a more generic sense, a Zulu household.

  laager: An Afrikaner camp, usually ringed by interlocking wagons.

  legionaries: Roman foot soldiers between 300 B.C. and A.D. 500, equipped with a javelin (pilum), short sword (gladius), and large oblong shield (scutum), who fought in a legion of about 6,000 men.

  MACV: Military Assistance Command Vietnam—the title of the American military presence in South Vietnam.

  Malinche: Cortés’s Indian name, derived from the Aztec Mainulli or Malinali (the twelfth Mexican month); originally the name of Doña Marina, the companion and translator of Cortés, and then by association to Cortés himself.

  Mamluks: A servile caste of warriors who eventually came to dominate Egypt from the thirteenth through seventeenth centuries.

  maniple: A unit of the Roman army, numbering at full strength about 200 legionaries; thirty maniples made up a legion of 6,000 soldiers. For most of the early republic, maniples were the chief tactical units of the army.

  medieval: An adjective referring to the culture of the Middle Ages, from the Latin medius (“middle”) + aevum (“age”).

  metic: A resident alien of the Greek city-state; most numerous in Athens.

  Middle Ages: A chronological term roughly describing some 1,000 years of European history between the collapse of Rome (A.D. ca. 450) and the beginning of the Renaissance (ca. 1450); used most often in association with western Europe.

  Natal: A British colony in southwestern Africa, located to the immediate south and west of Zululand, with its capital at Durban.

  Panhellenic: Literally “all Greek”; often used in association with the loose alliance of Greek city-states that fought Persia.

  phalangites: Pike-bearing Macedonian infantrymen who fought in the phalanx of the Hellenistic age.

  phalanx: A formation of heavy-armed hoplites or phalangites, consisting of columns of spearmen from eight to sixteen men deep.

  pike: A long pole with sharp metal tip; pikes, as distinguished from spears, were over ten feet in length and required both hands for use. Most commonly associated with the Macedonians and medieval Swiss infantry.

  polis: A politically autonomous Greek city-state, including the urban center and surrounding rural territory; plural: poleis.

  proskynēsis: The act of prostrating oneself before a lord and/or kissing his feet; a normal practice in Persia, but
considered repugnant to Hellenic culture when Alexander attempted to introduce it among his troops.

  Punic Wars: Three wars (264–241 B.C.; 218–201 B.C.; 149–146 B.C.) fought between Rome and Carthage, which eventually led to the destruction of Carthage itself.

  res publica: Roman form of consensual government under which popular representatives, more often than the people themselves, voted for both executive officers and general legislation.

  samurai: Feudal Japanese warriors, whose mythical military code of conduct and values the Japanese military attempted to resurrect and instill in its soldiers in the 1930s and early 1940s.

  sarissa: The long pike of some fourteen to twenty feet, carried by Macedonian infantrymen with both hands.

  Ten Thousand: Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger in 401 B.C. to anchor his Persian army in its quest to capture the Persian crown.

  timariot: An Ottoman lord who was given conquered land and control of rural serfs in exchange for promises to provide soldiers during war.

  tribunes: The six senior military officers of a legion; in a political sense, magistrates of the state entrusted to watch over the interests of the plebs.

  trireme: A Greek warship with three banks of oarsmen, consisting of about 170 rowers.

  Victoria Cross: The British military’s highest award for bravery—a bronze medal in the shape of a Maltese cross.

  Vietcong: Purportedly, an independent communist insurgency group in South Vietnam; in fact, an army dependent on the guidance and supply of the communist government of North Vietnam.

  Western: Generic adjective for European civilization that grew up in and west of Greece, and shared core values that originated in classical antiquity, including but not limited to constitutional government, civil liberties, free exchange of ideas, self-critique, private property, capitalism, and separation between religious and political/scientific thought.

  For Further Reading

  Chapter One: Why the West Has Won