B005GG0JPO EBOK

by Strauss, Barry

  The Carthaginians outnumbered the enemy forty ships to thirty-five, and they had a land army to support them; the Romans had only the marines aboard ship. But the Romans were much hungrier for a win. Knowing that their own men held the shore, the Carthaginians gave up practically as soon as the enemy drew blood. Hasdrubal probably watched in shame as they ran their ships aground on the beach and fled. The Romans dared to row in close and towed off twenty-five of the enemy’s ships—nearly two-thirds of Hasdrubal’s flotilla.

  It wasn’t a decisive operation, and Carthage still had command of Spain. But it was an ominous sign of a growing threat in Hannibal’s rear. Hannibal had trusted his brother Hasdrubal to hold Carthage’s Spanish base while he defeated Rome in Italy. If Hasdrubal failed, if he lost control of Spain to Rome, then Hannibal’s entire war plan might come tumbling down.

  A little more than 150 years later and eight hundred miles to the east, in the gathering darkness of a winter evening in southern Italy, disappointment struck again. Julius Caesar’s men stood on a quay and faced the sight of an enemy navy that had escaped from under their noses. Two weeks earlier, Pompey and 27,000 soldiers had arrived in the fortified port city of Brundisium, where a fleet awaited them. He planned to sail his troops across the Adriatic Sea to northern Greece, where he would build a new and bigger army, aided by his many allies in the East. Since he controlled the sea, Pompey knew that he could return the following year and fight from a position of strength.

  Caesar planned to stop him. He had one part of his army lay siege to Brundisium and the other part try to close off the harbor, outside its walls, by building a mole across it. But Pompey fought back.

  In the end, when Caesar’s troops broke into Brundisium, there was nothing left of Pompey’s forces except two ships stuck in Caesar’s breakwater. All the rest had escaped. Pompey had succeeded in breaking out of his great opponent’s trap.

  “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” When he wrote his famous maxim, German General Helmuth von Moltke (1800–1891) was thinking of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 but he might have had our three commanders in mind. Soon after going to war, each of them had to rewrite his plans.

  Alexander discovered just how much harm the Persian fleet could do him under the command of a great admiral. Hannibal faced an enemy who sidestepped his attack in Italy but threatened his rear in Spain. Caesar met an enemy who rebuffed him and regrouped for a counterattack. All three men faced frustration.

  Military thinkers, ancient and modern, would certainly sympathize. Most generals and kings, wrote Polybius, think only about success; they “do not envision the consequences of misfortune or consider at all how they should behave and what they should do in the event of disaster, although . . . [it] takes great foresight.”

  The American admiral James Stockdale put it succinctly: “The challenge of education is not to prepare a person for success, but to prepare him for failure.”

  How prepared for failure were Alexander, Hannibal, and Caesar? Did they adjust with agility?

  ALEXANDER

  After smashing the Persians at the Granicus, Alexander was free to get down to business. That business was decidedly not marching eastward against Darius. Not yet. Alexander’s immediate need was to get food for his men and money to pay them. That in turn meant winning over the cities of western Anatolia, most of which were Greek. With his army to remind them who was in charge Alexander offered carrots and sticks. To popular acclaim, he replaced oligarchies with democracies. This was less idealism than pragmatism on Alexander’s part. Aristotle had taught him that democracies were more stable than oligarchies. In western Anatolia, where Persia had long supported oligarchy, democrats were Macedon’s natural allies. He also imposed taxes, nicely relabeled as “contributions.” The locals cheered for democracy and accepted taxation with the resignation of people who were used to conquerors. Alexander claimed he had come to “liberate” these cities, but they knew better than to take him at face value.

  Before turning eastward, Alexander had to control the west. So far, he had won a battle but not the war. The Persian navy commanded the Aegean; a new Persian army could march westward in massive numbers. Alexander’s forces were still relatively small and poor. He would soon need reinforcements to replace men lost in battle or to sickness or left behind to garrison conquered territory.

  There would still be dozens of twists and turns in the conflict. Each resulted from a Persian counterattack; each tested Alexander. The three most important are Memnon’s naval offensive, the battle of Issus, and the siege of Tyre.

  Wooden Walls: Persia’s First Counterattack

  Four hundred Persian galleys—“wooden walls,” as a Greek once called warships—dominated the eastern Mediterranean. With its naval superiority, Persia could cut the enemy’s communications, land in Greece, and raise a revolt against Macedon. That would force Alexander to return home or risk losing Macedon, his native land and the source of future reinforcements. Alexander could solve the problem by beating the Persian fleet, but how could he polish off a much better navy?

  By doing it on land! Alexander claimed that by using his army and siege train to capture Persia’s seaports, he could deny the enemy the use of its fleet. The Persians weren’t buying, though.

  Memnon of Rhodes was both the brains and the muscle behind Persia’s naval policy. His strategic audacity and tactical toughness equaled Alexander’s, but unlike Alexander, Memnon was not king; Darius was. As a foreigner and one linked with a rival Persian family, Memnon never won Darius’s complete trust. In fact, Memnon was forced to send his wife and children to Darius as hostages in order to hold his command. But when Memnon fought, he made Alexander sweat.

  The first round took place in summer 334 at Miletus, a key port on the Aegean coast of Anatolia. The Persian navy didn’t perform as well as some hoped, and we might wonder whether Memnon was there, as one source—but only one source—states. In any case, the mere presence of the Persian fleet spooked Alexander, as it turned out. It happened as follows:

  Miletus sat on a narrow peninsula in the Gulf of Latmos, protected by the strategic island of Lade nearby. A pro-Persian party governed the city with the support of a garrison of Greek mercenaries. As Alexander’s army approached by land, the pro-Persians got the good news that Persia’s fleet of four hundred ships was on its way. But Alexander’s navy of 160 ships reached Miletus first. Whoever controlled the island of Lade controlled access to Miletus, so the Macedonians landed at Lade and garrisoned it with five hundred men. The Persians were compelled to anchor across the Gulf of Latmos, about three miles away. (Ancient navies always needed a friendly shore to find food and water and to anchor at night.)

  Meanwhile, the Macedonians debated strategy. Alexander’s chief subordinate was Parmenio, a much older man, a political power in his own right, and Philip’s greatest general. Alexander respected Parmenio but distrusted him. Parmenio now advised a naval battle but Alexander refused to risk it against an enemy that was superior both in numbers and experience. He worried that his “allies” back in Greece were so restive that they would rise in revolt at the mere news of a Macedonian defeat at sea.

  Instead of fighting a naval battle, Alexander used his fleet as a shield. His ships held the Persian fleet at a distance while, on land, his army laid siege to Miletus. His engines quickly broke through the walls and took the city. Some of the enemy garrison tried to swim to safety but Alexander’s navy captured them. Still, Alexander feared that the Persian fleet would come back and defeat his navy, so he sent a unit of cavalrymen on a long march around the Gulf to the Persians’ anchorage, where they destroyed the enemies’ shore parties. Now the Persians had to sail off to the island of Samos for supplies, an additional five miles away. The battle for Miletus was effectively over.

  Alexander’s fleet had played a role in the victory, but he was not impressed. It was his army that captured the city and his cavalry that drove the Persian fleet away. Besides, Alexander never entirel
y trusted the sailors, who came from his less-than-loyal Greek allies. He considered the navy a bad bargain, given the expense of paying the sailors and keeping the ships in trim. So Alexander made a bold decision: he sent most of the fleet home.

  Alexander dismissed 140 ships, keeping only 20 Athenian vessels to carry siege equipment; incidentally, the several thousand Athenian sailors were virtual hostages. It was a major blunder. As the Miletus campaign showed, Alexander’s fleet was of limited use but it was not useless. Worse, no navy meant no defense against a Persian thrust across the Aegean. If the Persians chose to strike, Alexander had left them a wide-open target.

  Alexander took risks but usually with carefully planned forethought. Dismissing his navy was different. Suddenly Alexander gave up one of the foundations of his strategy and replaced it with an untested theory: that it was possible to defeat sea power on land. This decision was a mistake. As a Macedonian, Alexander came from a nation of landlubbers. Maybe he just plain distrusted ships.

  The Persian fleet now sailed south to Halicarnassus, another major naval base on the Aegean coast. Alexander fought hard—on land—to take the city, while Memnon fought even harder to organize its defense. At Halicarnassus, unlike at Miletus, the Persians had control of the sea, which gave Memnon’s forces mobility and access to supplies.

  In the end, Halicarnassus gave Alexander a tactical victory but a strategic defeat. Alexander forced Memnon to withdraw from the town—but not from the fortified port, which remained in Persian hands. During the siege Memnon inflicted high casualties on the Macedonians. He also defeated Alexander’s attack on the neighboring port city of Myndus by sending naval reinforcements to the Persian garrison there. Memnon evacuated most of his soldiers from Halicarnassus to the nearby island of Cos. But the Persians retained a naval presence on Anatolia’s Aegean coast: in their garrison at Halicarnassus, at Myndus, and in two port cities farther south, Cnidus and Caunus, neither of which was easy to attack by land. In short, Alexander did not drive the Persian fleet from all bases on the Anatolian coast.

  It was the end of the year 334 B.C. and it marked Memnon’s moment. The veteran warrior finally convinced Darius to let him launch a major naval offensive, made up of three hundred ships and fifteen thousand mercenary soldiers. Since Alexander had virtually no navy, this force could sweep across the Aegean Sea and bring the war to Greece. It was what Churchill would later call a “soft underbelly” strategy: attacking the enemy not where he was strong and protected, but where he was weak.

  Memnon began his naval offensive in spring 333. Right away he took several important Aegean islands allied to Alexander, including Chios and all of Lesbos except the big city of Mytilene, which fell after a siege. According to one source, the Persians also retook Miletus.

  Alexander was concerned. His gamble of dissolving his navy now seemed foolhardy. It was time to revise his plans. He sent a huge sum to Greece in order to raise a new fleet but it would not be ready for months.

  Then he continued southward and eastward, to Anatolia’s Mediterranean coast, where he could deny Persia access to an important source of sailors and ship timber as well as capture additional ports. Deprived of these ports, Persian ships found it much riskier to travel between the Aegean and Persia’s major naval bases in Phoenicia (modern Lebanon). Alexander did another thing as well: he raised money from the rich cities in southern Anatolia. If they refused to be “liberated,” he marched on them.

  All the while, Alexander kept his eye on Memnon and the Aegean. After leaving Halicarnassus, he divided his forces. He kept half of his army with him and sent the rest, under Parmenio, to the city of Gordium in north-central Anatolia. Gordium was the perfect pivot point. From there, Parmenio could march back to Macedonia, if Memnon attacked, or send reinforcements to Alexander, if needed.

  Alexander cultivated an image of action. But except for his dismissal of his fleet, his overall policy during his first year in Anatolia was slow and deliberate. The myth was different. Nothing symbolizes it better than an event at Gordium in spring 333. There, Alexander “fulfilled” a prophecy that he would conquer the Persian empire by untying an immensely intricate knot: he “untied” the knot by cutting it with his sword. The man who cut the Gordian knot had no patience for the slow and deliberate way of doing things. He was a dashing young hero forging always forward. But that was just the myth.

  In fact, Alexander was cautious enough to know when to call off an attack, even if it allowed his enemies to boast that they had beaten the mighty Alexander. Myndus, the port near Halicarnassus, was just one example of his holding back; he did the same with the cities of Termessus and Syllium, both located just inland from Anatolia’s Mediterranean coast. A good commander knows when to retreat, and Alexander did. He had bigger problems, after all.

  For a moment in spring 333, it looked as if Alexander’s early victories might fall victim to Persia’s counterattack. But Divine Providence smiled: in June, Memnon died of an illness. His nephew, Pharnabazus, and his deputy, Autophradates, continued the campaign, but they were lesser men. They couldn’t match Memnon’s skill at war, his knowledge of Macedon, or his clout with Darius.

  Memnon’s death was a turning point. Had he lived, he might have lit a fire in Greece. He would probably have conquered other strategic Greek islands and landed on the mainland with fifteen thousand Greek mercenaries. Important city-states were ready to join the Persians in the fight, especially Sparta, which had never accepted Macedonian rule. In 331, these states actually did rebel against Macedon, but it was too late. By then, Alexander had acquired so much loot that he could finance a new mercenary army to add to the small force that he had left behind to defend Macedon. They crushed the rebels. But a rebellion in 333 would have forced Alexander to march back home to defend Macedon. That would not have been easy if Memnon had blockaded the Hellespont.

  In May 333 it seemed that Alexander’s policy had failed: he could not stop Persia’s naval offensive without a navy of his own. But in June, Memnon’s death saved him.

  Darius ended the naval offensive. He decided to withdraw most of the mercenaries from the fleet and transfer them to the mainland. Had Memnon survived, he might have persuaded the Persian king to reconsider. As it was, Darius decided to take resources from the war at sea, where the enemy was weak, and transfer them to a battle on land, where the enemy was strong.

  The Battle of Issus: Persia’s Second Counterattack

  It is the most famous face-off in the history of art. A mosaic from Pompeii shows the scene. Alexander the Great, spear in hand, charges on horseback against Darius of Persia. Three Persian cavalrymen and a row of pikes are all that come between the two warrior-kings. Driving ever forward, with his horsemen riding beside him, Alexander is poised to kill Darius. The Persian king is in danger and he knows it: he stands wide-eyed on his chariot, facing Alexander. But Darius’s charioteer is ready: having turned the horses away from Alexander, he pulls the reins and cracks a whip to spur a rapid escape.

  Frozen in time, the moment captures the climax of a dramatic clash of kings: the battle of Issus, on or around November 1, 333 B.C. On an autumn afternoon, the Macedonian and Persian armies fought over the fate of empire. The Macedonians were a winning and experienced force but the Persians had strengths too and they outnumbered the Macedonians two to one.

  Issus is known as a clash of kings that highlighted Alexander’s heroism. That’s no accident. Like the Kennedys or Princess Diana, Alexander had a knack for public relations and he highlighted his valor. But, in truth, Issus demanded other qualities; not Alexander’s heroism so much as his coolness, steadiness, and caution won the battle.

  The die was cast for combat by spring 333 when Darius gathered an army. He knew, of course, of the risk of fighting the Macedonians in pitched battle. But Darius’s own army was no pushover. The Persian king was aware that Alexander was heading south and east. In fact, by summer 333, Alexander reached Cilicia, the fertile and wealthy plain on Turkey’s southern coast and the g
ateway to Syria. In the months before, he had rejoined Parmenio and the rest of the army at Gordium, where he received four thousand to six thousand reinforcements, mostly from Macedonia.

  Not wanting to risk Alexander’s entry into the heart of the empire in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), Darius chose to fight him in Syria. The Persian had to respond quickly, which meant that he had no time to gather all of the empire’s far-flung forces. In particular, Darius would have to do without the great horsemen of Central Asia. But he would gather a strong army, even so.

  By September, Darius and his soldiers were ready to march. October 333 saw them camped on the plains of Syria, with the tall Amanus Mountains lying to the west and Cilicia—and the Macedonians—beyond. Alexander had surely heard of Darius’s plans, but he was shocked to discover how close the enemy was: in Syria, less than a week’s march away.

  Both armies wanted to fight, but in entirely different places. The Persians wanted the contest on the wide plains of Syria, where they could spread out and make use of their superior numbers. Alexander hoped to fight in a narrow space between the mountains and the sea, where the Persians could not deploy their army comfortably. There was suitable terrain around Issus, a coastal city at the head of the Gulf of Issus (today, Turkey’s Gulf of Iskenderun). There, a coastal strip, only several miles wide, stretches from the Amanus Mountains to the Mediterranean. As it turned out, Alexander got to fight where he wanted but not as he wanted.