The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (4 page)

The United States was born through war, reunited by war, and saved from destruction by war. No future generation, however comfortable and affluent, can escape that terrible knowledge. Our freedom is not entirely our own; in some sense it is mortgaged from those who paid the ultimate price for its continuance. My own life of security, freedom, opportunity, and relative affluence certainly has been made possible because a grandfather fought and was gassed in the Argonne; an uncle in the Marines died trying to stop Japanese imperialism on Okinawa; a cousin in the Army lost his life at twenty-two trying to stop Hitler in France; and my father in the Army Air Force flew forty times over Japan hoping to end the idea of the expansive Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. I have spent some time these past decades trying to learn where, how, and why they and their generations fought as they did—and what our own obligations are to acknowledge their sacrifices.

What has changed in our perceptions of war in and outside the university over the more than thirty years since I first studied war in an esoteric dissertation on the ravaging of farms in the classical Greek world? War, like agriculture, certainly has not disappeared, although its superficial face has seemingly changed as much as family farming has been superseded by corporate agribusiness.

Instead, there have been ever more varieties of war, large and small, nearly bloodless and nearly genocidal, insurgencies and conventional conflicts—in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Chechnya, the Congo, East Timor, Grenada, the Falklands, Iran, Iraq, Panama, Pakistan, Rwanda, and other landscapes too numerous to cite. The public interest in reading about these conflicts, whether measured through books sales or television ratings, has seldom been higher. And yet as popular culture, research institutions, and journalists explore conflict as never before, the formal study of military history remains the orphaned child of the college and university, as if we academics could wish away what we fear to be inescapable.

Does that even matter? And if so, what, then, can we do to restore the study of war to its proper place in the life of the American mind? The challenge is not just to reform the graduate schools or the professoriate, though that would help, since the universities offer a collective common learning experience to millions of young Americans who will inherit self-governance in the decades ahead, and may one day decide when, how, and why their children are to fight.

On a deeper level, we need to reexamine the larger forces that have devalued the very idea of military history—of the understanding of war itself. We must question the well-meaning but naive faith that with enough money, education, or good intentions we can change the nature of mankind so that conflict, as if by fiat, becomes a thing of the past. Such entrenched academic thinking if sanctioned by our university elite, may well encourage some to begin wars. In the end, the study of war reminds us that we will never quite evolve into gods but simply remain mere mortals. And that means some will always prefer war to peace; and other men and women, hopefully the more numerous and powerful who have learned from the past, will have a moral obligation to stop them.

Studying War: Where to Start

T
HE BEST PLACE
to begin studying war is with the stories of soldiers themselves. E. B. Sledge’s memoir
With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa
is nightmarish, but it reminds us that while war often translates to rot, filth, and carnage, it can also be in the service of a noble cause. Elmer Bendiner’s tragic retelling of the annihilation of B-17s over Germany,
The Fall of Fortresses: A Personal Account of the Most Daring, and Deadly, American Air Battles of World War II
, is an unrecognized classic.

For a different wartime perspective, that of the generals, Ulysses S. Grant’s
Personal Memoirs
is justly celebrated as a model of prose. Yet the nearly contemporaneous
Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman
is far more analytical in its dissection of the human follies and pretensions that lead to war. Likewise, George S. Patton’s
War as I Knew It
is not only a compilation of the eccentric general’s diary entries but also a candid assessment of human nature itself. Xenophon’s
Anabasis
, the story of how the Greek Ten Thousand fought their way out of the Persian Empire, begins the genre of the general’s memoir.

Fiction often captures the experience of war as effectively as memoir, beginning with Homer’s
Iliad
, in which Achilles confronts the paradox that rewards do not always go to the most deserving in war. The three most famous novels about the futility of conflict are Stephen Crane’s
The Red Badge of Courage
, Erich Maria Remarque’s
All Quiet on the Western Front
, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
August 1914
. No work has better insights on the folly of war, however, than Euripides’
Trojan Women
or Thucydides’
History of the Peloponnesian War.

Although many contemporary critics find it passé to document landmark battles in history, one can find a storehouse of information in
The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: From Marathon to Waterloo
, by Edward S. Creasy, and
A Military History of the Western World
, by J. F. C. Fuller. Hans Delbrück’s
History of the Art of War
and Russell F. Weigley’s
The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo
center their sweeping histories on decisive engagements, using battles like Marathon and Waterloo to illustrate larger social, political, and cultural values. A sense of high drama permeates William H. Prescott’s
History of the Conquest of Mexico
and
History of the Conquest of Peru
, while tragedy more often characterizes Steven Runciman’s spellbinding
The Fall of Constantinople, 1453,
and Donald R. Morris’s massive
The Washing of the Spears: A History of the Rise of the Zulu Nation Under Shaka and Its Fall in the Zulu War of 1879
. The most comprehensive and accessible one-volume treatment of history’s most destructive war remains Gerhard L. Weinberg’s
A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II
.

Relevant histories for our current struggle with Middle East terrorism are Alistair Horne’s superb
A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962
, Michael B. Oren’s
Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East
, and Mark Bowden’s
Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War
. While anything John Keegan writes is worth reading, his
The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme
remains the most impressive general military history of the last fifty years.

Biography too often winds up ignored in the study of war. Plutarch’s lives of Pericles, Alcibiades, Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Alexander the Great established the traditional view of these great captains as men of action, while weighing their record of near-superhuman achievement against their megalomania. Elizabeth Longford’s
Wellington
is a classic study of England’s greatest soldier.
Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command
, by Douglas Southall Freeman, for all its detractors, remains spellbinding.

If “war is the continuation of politics by other means,” as Carl von Clausewitz stated, then study of civilian wartime leadership is critical. The classic scholarly account of the proper relationship between the military and its overseers is still Samuel P. Huntington’s
The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations
. For a contemporary j’accuse of American military leadership during the Vietnam War, see H. R. McMaster’s
Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam
.

Eliot A. Cohen’s
Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership in Wartime
, purportedly a favorite read of George W. Bush’s, argues that successful leaders like Ben-Gurion, Churchill, Clemenceau, and Lincoln kept a tight rein on their generals and never confused officers’ esoteric military expertise with either political sense or strategic resolution.

In
The Mask of Command
, Keegan examines the military competence of Alexander the Great, Wellington, Grant, and Hitler, and comes down on the side of the two who fought under consensual government. In
The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny
, I took that argument further and suggested that three of history’s most audacious generals—Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton—were also keen political thinkers, with strategic insight into what made their democratic armies so formidable.

How politicians lose wars is also of interest. See especially Ian Kershaw’s biography
Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis
. Mark Moyar’s first volume of a proposed two-volume reexamination of Vietnam,
Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965
, is akin to reading Euripides’ tales of self-inflicted woe and missed chances. Alistair Horne’s
To Lose a Battle: France 1940
is also noteworthy.

Few historians can weave military narrative into the contemporary political and cultural landscape. James M. McPherson does in
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
, a volume that ushered in the most recent renaissance of Civil War history. Barbara W. Tuchman’s
The Guns of August
describes the first month of the First World War in riveting but excruciatingly sad detail. Two volumes by David McCullough,
Truman
and
1776
, give fascinating inside accounts of the political will necessary to continue wars amid domestic depression and bad news from the front. So does Martin Gilbert’s
Winston S. Churchill: Finest Hour, 1939–1941
. Donald Kagan’s
On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace
warns against the dangers of appeasement, especially the lethal combination of tough rhetoric and little military preparedness, in a survey of wars from ancient Greece to the Cuban missile crisis. Robert Kagan’s
Dangerous Nation
reminds Americans that their idealism (if not self-righteousness) is nothing new, but rather it helps explain more than two centuries of intervention—wise or ill-considered—abroad.

Any survey on military history should conclude with more abstract lessons about war.
Principles of War
by Clausewitz remains the cornerstone of the science. Niccolò Machiavelli’s
The Art of War
blends realism with classical military detail. Two indispensable works,
War: Ends and Means
, by Angelo Codevilla and Paul Seabury, and
Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age
, edited by Peter Paret, provide refreshingly honest accounts of the timeless rules and nature of war.

CHAPTER 2

Classical Lessons and
Post-9/11 Wars

Peace—the Parenthesis
*

I
N ADVOCATING MORE
military history in the university, I first confess to an odd bias about the proper foundation for studying wars of the past. I was a Greek and Latin language professor for twenty-one years. After eight prior years of undergraduate and graduate training in the classical languages, I was indoctrinated to believe that starting at the beginning of anything is always good advice. Consequently, reading a historian of wars such as Edward Gibbon, W. H. Prescott, or Stephen Ambrose can make more sense once one has read what Thucydides or Xenophon wrote about conflict centuries earlier. Classical explanations and accounts of war take us far from the politics, noise, and fashions of the contemporary world. They allow us to think in terms of larger blueprints, abstract ideas, and age-old paradoxes about war in general that in turn elevate and enrich the modern debate about particular recent wars.

The study of classics—the literature and history of Greece and Rome—can also offer moral insight in the post–September 11 world, as well as a superb grounding in art, literature, history, and language. By the same token, the absence of familiarity with the foundations of Western culture in part may explain many of the odder and more emotional reactions to recent wars that we have seen expressed in popular American culture.

War in classical antiquity—and for most of the past 2,500 years of Western civilization—was seen as a tragedy. But it was one that was innate to the human condition, recurrent, and terribly familiar. Conflict was seen as a time of human plague. The historian Herodotus said of war that fathers bury sons rather than sons bury fathers. Killing humans over disagreements should not happen among civilized people, but predictably will occur.

War, the poet Hesiod lamented, was “a curse from Zeus”—something of near divine parentage that mere men must endure. Of course, in a preindustrial world without nuclear weapons or conventional machines of mass annihilation, the Greeks’ seasonal war making did not necessarily translate into modern notions of battlefield genocide.

More died in the siege of Stalingrad than probably perished on all sides in all theaters during the twenty-seven-year-long Peloponnesian War. The Greeks could fight seasonally for decades on end (the Athenians on average waged war three out of four years in the fifth century) and called their bloodletting, in the words of the philosopher Heraclitus, “the father, the king of us all.” We moderns, after three seasons of Hiroshimas, or four or five battles of Kursk, would know war instead as “the end of us all.”

Nevertheless, the preindustrial Greeks are to be listened to when they warn that conflict will always break out—and very frequently so—because we are human, and thus not always rational. Even the utopian Plato agreed: “War is always existing by nature between every Greek city-state,” one of the characters in his
Laws
matter-of-factly remarks. How galling to us moderns that Plato, of all people, once called peace—not war—the real “parenthesis” in human affairs. Similar tragic acknowledgments can be found in the works of the historians Polybius, Thucydides, and Xenophon, who assumed wars among the city-states would always be breaking out somewhere. The Greeks, of course, wrote down unenforceable rules of war making on stone, proclaimed fifty-year truces and alliances, produced plays about the insanity of war, looked at times to strongmen to enforce a perpetual peace among squabbling city-states—and all the while usually kept right on fighting.

Warfare could be terrifying—“a thing of fear,” as the poet Pindar summed it up—and senseless, but not therein unnatural or in every instance wholly evil. The Greeks would remind us that evil genocide in Darfur did not stop because of elevated global oratory or the impassioned pleas of nongovernment organizations. It continued because the Western public (whose militaries alone had the resources to stop the ethnic and religious bloodletting) did not wish to endanger hundreds of its pilots and tank commanders in a far distant land to save hundreds of thousands who could be more easily forgotten by switching the television channel—and thereby ensure that their children would not be trying to stop a Rwanda a year from Africa to Latin America.

While for the Greeks all wars presented only bad and worse choices, and were tragic in the sense of destroying the lives of young men who in peacetime had no intrinsic reason to murder one another, conflicts could still be judged as more or less good or evil depending on their causes, the nature of the fighting, and the ultimate costs and results. Some wars then were deemed better than others, and it was not all that difficult to make the necessary distinctions.

The Greek defense against the overwhelming Persian attack in 480
B.C.
, in the eyes of the playwright Aeschylus (who chose as his epitaph mention of his service at the battle of Marathon, not his masterpiece the
Orestia
), was “glorious.” Yet the theme of Thucydides’ history of the internecine Peloponnesian War was self-destructive folly, and sometimes senseless butchery from Corcyra and Melos to the revolting mess at the Assinarus River in Sicily. Likewise, language of freedom and liberty is associated with the Greeks’ naval victory at “divine” Salamis, but not so with the slaughter at the Battle of Gaugamela—Alexander the Great’s destruction of the Persian army in Mesopotamia that wrecked Darius III’s empire and replaced eastern despots with Macedonian autocrats.

The Greeks tried to define plenty of just wars while establishing the basis of both legitimate and unfair war making. Those who employed missile weapons—arrows, catapults, sling bullets—at times were felt to be either uncivilized or unfair for killing randomly from afar. Others who killed Greeks rather than
barbaroi
(foreigners) were deemed murderous (Alexander the Great probably killed more Greeks in Asia than Xerxes ever did in Greece). Some who conscripted slaves, or hired mercenaries, or butchered civilians were relegated to the status of near murderers rather than war makers. Nonetheless, wars of all sorts went on and were judged as bad or good by their perceived conduct, results, morality, and utility.

Indeed, in matters military, the greatest difference between our own world and the ancients’ is this present-day notion that war itself—rather than particular wars per se—must be inherently evil. Aristophanes’
Peace
is a screed against the Peloponnesian War, as is Euripides’
Trojan Wars
. Neither playwright, however, would have objected to the Persian wars and the “Marathon men” who fought them.

The Greek mind had little in common with either “The Sermon on the Mount” or Immanuel Kant’s idealistic guidelines for how to ensure perpetual peace between nations. Few Greeks trusted in expressed good intentions or shared notions of brotherhood to keep the peace—although writers as diverse as Plato and Isocrates outlined ways in which the city-states could curtail internecine conflicts. What usually stopped wars from breaking out for a season or two was more likely the notion of an enemy’s larger phalanx, bigger fleet, or higher ramparts, which created some sort of perceived deterrence—and with it the impression that any ensuing war for an adventurous state could be too unprofitable, costly, or drawn out.

I emphasize “more likely,” since hubris, miscalculation, greed, misplaced honor, and an array of other emotions often led
strategoi
(generals)—like Alcibiades, Pelopidas, Cleombrotus, and Pyrrhus—to roll the knucklebones when reason advised otherwise. Disastrous wars were common because-less-than-competent leaders often misjudged the likely outcome or felt the costs would be worth the desired benefits.

The Roots of War

W
HILE WAR WAS
innate to the ancients, and its morality more often defined by particular circumstances, fighting was not necessarily justified by prior exploitation or legitimate grievance. Fifth-century Greek historians largely introduced into the Greek vocabulary the binary
prophasis and aitia
—the pretext and the real cause—often to emphasize that what military leaders claimed were understandable provocations were not, or at least not believable ones.

Nor did aggression have to arise from poverty or inequality. States, like people, the historian Thucydides demonstrates, could be envious—and unpredictable and aggressive without apparent reason. Theban oligarchs in spring 431 had no ostensible reason to attack tiny, neighboring Plataea at a time of peace, a provocation that helped to start the Peloponnesian War. I should say “no logical reason,” inasmuch as the Thebans entertained a long-standing hatred of the isolated Athenian ally, a belief that they could take the city at little cost, and, in the fashion of Mussolini in 1940, a hunch that they should stake a quick claim to spoils since a powerful ally (in this case, Sparta) was about to prevail in a far larger war.

If megalomaniacal assailants like King Xerxes of Persia could sense there was little cost to enacting their agendas, they surely would persist in seemingly unnecessary aggression until convinced otherwise. Again, I emphasize words like “unnecessary,” in the sense that a Persia of more than twenty million had no real reason to absorb tiny, materially poor, relatively underpopulated, and distant Greece—other than to make an example of an upstart people who had humiliated the Great King during the earlier Ionian War and the disastrous Persian landing at Marathon. It certainly did not need more lebensraum for the Persian peoples.

The Athenians in Thucydides’ history claim that they acquired and kept their empire largely out of “honor, fear, and self-interest”—more than any rational calculation of profit making or the acquisition of valuable foreign territory. Sparta preempted and attacked Athens in spring 431, Thucydides says, because of a “fear” of growing Athenian power—and apparently without a desire to annex Attic farmland, or a detailed plan to confiscate the rich Athenian silver mines at Laurium, or a plot to raise bullion by enslaving and selling off the population.

We of the present do not quite understand this idea of simple “fear” causing wars. Indeed, we of the post-Marxist age of materialism, wedded as we are to the supremacy of reason, often search in vain for a magic oil field or strategic concession that would explain the inexplicable wars in Vietnam or Iraq. We insist that there is a shady pipeline that must “really” account for the intervention in an otherwise impoverished Afghanistan, and that some sort of offshore treasure near the Falklands Islands made the desolate atoll of some strategic or economic value to the British navy. In truth, Greek catalysts like anger, pride, honor, fear, and perceived self-interest often better explain the desire to wage such conflicts, big and small. When asked why one-billion-person-strong China would consider invading much smaller but similarly communist Vietnam—and to the benefit the genocidal regime in Cambodia—Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping matter-of-factly said to his American hosts in January 1979, “It’s time to smack the bottom of unruly little children.”

According to the canons of such self-acknowledged Hellenic cynicism, the Japanese and Germans in 1941 were not starving, or short of land, or unable to acquire strategic materials on the open market. Hitler received far more strategic materials through purchase from a compliant Stalin before June 1941 than he was ever as able to extract through violence from an occupied and bitterly hostile Soviet Union. Rather they were proud peoples, stung by past slights and perceived grievances, who wanted deference from those whom they deemed inferior and weak. Both countries, after all, now seem nonthreatening, and content enough with larger populations and smaller territories in peacetime than they did in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War. Both have consensual governments as well, which apparently understand the bitter wages of attacking neighbors in wars of aggrandizement.

Does China, with trillions of dollars in foreign reserves, really need the few extra million Taiwanese as a part of its citizenry, or the rather mountainous terrain of the island of Formosa to add to its agricultural potential? Is the allure of blackmail money—or fear and a distorted sense of honor—what makes a bankrupt North Korea, whose people are often reduced to eating grass, serially threaten to annihilate South Korea, Japan, and the United States with expensive nuclear missiles? Much of the justification for the Russian invasion of Georgia in August 2008 transcended worry about Russian speakers in Georgian-controlled South Ossetia and instead seemed to focus on Russian “dignity” and “honor”—especially the sense of exasperation that a once tiny republic of the former Soviet Union now had the audacity to consider itself an equal to, and rival of, Mother Russia herself.

To a student of classics who gleans from a Thucydides or a Plato some notion of war, the present crisis that grew out of September 11, I think, might be interpreted in reductive fashion: The United States, being a strong and wealthy society, and with unrivaled global influence, invites envy. The success of its restless culture of freedom, constitutional democracy, self-critique, secular rationalism, and open markets provokes the resentment of both weaker and less-secure theocracy and autocracy alike. Who we are, how we think, and the manner in which we act, ipsis factis, are considered obnoxious, dangerous, and unpalatable to many fundamentalist Muslims around the globe, who endure manifestations of our power and influence daily, from DVDs in Kabul to text-messaging ads in Yemen.

In emblematic fashion, America stands as a protector of the global system of market capitalism and constitutional government, and of the often reckless modernist culture that threatens so much of tribal and indigenous custom and protocols. That we are therefore often to be hated by the authoritarian, the statist, and the tribalist—and periodically to be challenged by those who want to diminish our power, riches, or influence—is regrettable but nevertheless conceded.