Part IV
In this part . . .
Sadly, war is inseparable from human history. War and the ability and willingness to wage war drives societies and nations — a fact I chronicle throughout this book. Military might is important — often tragically important. People fight wars over boundaries, resources, ethnic differences, religious disagreements, and political alliances, among too many other causes. For example, in the twenty-first century, the United States initiated two wars in response to a terrorist attack on New York City, although it was never shown that the second of the nations invaded (Iraq) had anything to do with that attack.
In this part, you uncover the origins of war, how warfare has changed over many millennia, and how those changes shaped the world. You also get a glimpse of latter-day movements to end international aggression.
Chapter 16
In This Chapter
Reaching back to the roots of warfare
Organizing armies within civilizations
Battling deadly Assyrian and Persian versatility
Gathering the Roman legions
Standing together as Greeks: The phalanx
Without warfare, the human story would be very different, maybe unrecognizable. War stories are among the earliest and most influential folklore and literature. A prime example is The Iliad, which I discuss in Chapter 4. For millennia, everybody knew who fought the Trojan War and that the Greeks had won thanks to the epic poem.
Cultures in every corner of the world worshipped war gods and defined themselves by military conquest. By looking at how early wars were fought, you can get an idea of what set this violent species on the path toward smart missiles, stealth aircraft, and neutron bombs.
Fighting as an Ancient Way of Life
When outsiders first stumbled across the interior valleys of New Guinea in the 1930s, they found village after village of Stone Age farmers who looked on the people of the other villages around them as eternal enemies, or at least potential enemies. Revenge wars whose root causes were lost in time were the overwhelming rule.
We’re not the only ones making war
Scientists say humankind isn’t the only war-making species. What other animal indulges in such mass violence? For one, humanity’s closest genetic cousin, the chimpanzee. Researchers have seen bands of male chimps from one group raid another band. If they can, they kill all the other group’s males and gain mating privileges with the females.
Jane Goodall, the most famous researcher to study chimps, said, “If they had firearms and had been taught to use them, I suspect they would have used them to kill.” This and other evidence causes biologists such as Michael P. Ghiglieri of the University of Northern Arizona to believe that human beings didn’t invent war at all. Rather, war is a part of pre-human behavior.
In the late 1970s, anthropologist Carol Ember reported that 64 percent of remaining hunter-gatherer societies in the world at the time fought a war at least every two years. War was rare or absent in only 10 percent of groups studied. In the 1980s, another anthropologist, K.E. Otterbein, turned up even more dismaying results: Studying both hunter-gatherer and primitive farming peoples, he found that 92 percent waged war.
Archeologists note how often ancient human skulls appear to have received violent, bone-breaking blows as if from clubs or axes. The evidence suggests that ancient times were violent times and that people have always fought wars, or at least engaged in armed skirmishes.
Raising Armies
Cave people made war, but war only got organized on a large scale when civilization did. Armies arose among early civilizations in the Middle East (see Chapter 4), as did formations, such as the column and the line; and classic military strategy, such as theflanking maneuver (going around the side of the enemy line).
Sometime after 10,000 BC, the bow and sling both joined the warrior’s arsenal. Like the earlier spear and ax, these items surely doubled as hunting tools, but they changed the way wars were fought. A wooden bow with its string of animal gut could propel a stone-tipped arrow farther than a football field is long.
Made of a leather pad with two thin straps attached, the sling had even more range. The slinger put a rock or a solid, baked clay projectile into the pad, swung it around his head by the straps and then let one of the straps go, sending the missile flying. The Bible hero David felled the Philistine giant Goliath with a sling. Stone carvings from the tenth century BC show Mesopotamian soldiers (from what is now Iraq) using the weapon.
Keeping out attackers
Ancient cities had defensive walls, perhaps to keep out predatory animals, but most prehistorians who study defensive walls think they were built to protect against attackers. Jericho (see Chapter 4), perhaps the oldest town that left substantial ruins, was distinguished by a defensive ditch around the community, a stone wall, and a tower with an inside stairway. Towers let you see the attacking force while it’s still far away, and from the top, you can rain down projectiles on unwelcome visitors.
Another ancient ruin, the town of Catal Huyuk in central Turkey, is made up of mostly windowless, doorless houses — again, probably designed for security against attackers. Under siege, residents of the houses could pull up their ladders, drop the ladders and themselves through their rooftop hatches, close the hatches, and sit out the attack.
Defenses evolved wherever people clashed, which was just about anywhere people lived. European villagers as long as 4,000 years ago built hill forts ringed by earthen ramparts. By 220 BC, the Chinese put up the first parts of the Great Wall to protect against northern nomads. Eventually the Great Wall stretched 2,550 miles. When European explorers arrived in New Zealand in the eighteenth century, they found Maori warriors in timber forts atop steep coastal cliffs.
Escalating weapons technology: Using metal
As defenses evolved, so did weapons. A big leap came with metal blades and points. A mummified man from about 3300 BC found in the Italian Alps carried a copper ax. Copper is a soft metal, however, and that limited its usefulness as a weapon. By 3000 BC, Middle Eastern metalsmiths were mixing copper with tin to form the harder metal bronze.
Bronze made tough cutting blades and piercing points. People could also pound bronze into helmets, shields, and armor. Bronze battle-axes and swords became standard. Iron, which was even harder, followed at about 1500 BC.
Riding into battle: Hooves and wheels
Around 300 BC in Mesopotamia, armies used wheeled wagons to transport fighters. The people of Sumer, perhaps the first great urban civilization, fashioned heavy, clumsy vehicles with four solid wooden wheels that were pulled by donkeys or plodding oxen.
After about 1800 BC, armies preferred horsepower. They hitched horses to two-wheeled chariots, which were faster and lighter than the wagons but still big. Unlike the racing chariots in the 1959 movie Ben Hur (set in early first-century AD Rome), these earlier chariots carried several men — warriors, javelin throwers, and a driver. The Assyrians, whose civilization arose from the city-state of Assur, on the upper Tigris River, made especially good use of chariots in battle.
Awesome Assyrian Arsenals
Around the Middle East, the Sumerians, Egyptians, Babylonians, and Hittites were military powers in an ebb and flow of early martial power. But other, lesser-known peoples — Hurrians, Mitannians, Kassites, Elamites, and Amorites — fielded armed forces, too.
The Assyrians, whom I tell you more about in Chapter 4, grew particularly warlike. Perhaps Assyrian aggression began with defense. In the eleventh century BC, waves of nomadic northern invaders beat the Assyrian kingdom down to an area only 50 by 100 miles along the Tigris River in northern Mesopotamia. But at the end of the next century, Assyrian warriors began to overrun other societies until they ruled an empire 1,000 miles from border to border, stretching from Egypt to the Caucasus (between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea).
Assembling the units
At their height, the Assyrians could field an army of 100,000. But they also relied on specialized units: quick-moving, lightly armored infantry and slower but heavily armored infantry; warriors with spears, bows, slings, pikes, and swords; and war chariots.
Perhaps most impressive, the Assyrians had engineering units. Advance corps blazed trails and laid roads for supply wagons. When the army needed to cross a river, engineers built a pontoon bridge — much as it was done for thousands of years afterward. For pontoons, they used inflated animal skins and log or reed boats lashed together to float a roadway.
Assyrians also pioneered ways to get past a city’s defenses. They built siege engines, which were towers on wheels or sometimes on pontoons that could be moved right up next to a city’s walls. Siege engines were made of timber frames covered with layers of tough cowhide that could fend off arrows. Attackers could stay inside until the engine was in place, and then climb up the inside, emerge on top, and go over the wall. Another method involved building a ramp of dirt and rubble to scale the wall.
Sometimes Assyrian engineers went down instead of up — digging under a city’s wall and shoring up their tunnel with wooden beams, like a mine shaft. After they were under the wall, the engineers would set the tunnel supports on fire and then turn around and run for daylight. The supports burned up, the tunnel collapsed, and the wall above, literally undermined, crumbled. Soldiers advanced through the gap.
Wreaking havoc
Atrocities such as the wholesale slaughter of a city’s residents or the mass deportation of entire populations are among the worst aspects of modern war, but slaughter and deportation are anything but modern, and the Assyrians did both. In one instance, they deported 27,000 Jews — the Lost Tribes who disappeared from history — to eastern Syria. The Assyrians used captives as forced laborers, which sometimes made taking prisoners more economical than killing everybody.
The Assyrians finally fell from power at the end of the seventh century BC, when neighboring peoples united against them, but that didn’t mean Assyrian military methods were lost. The Persians built their own vast empire with war tactics inherited from the Assyrians.
Farming and Fighting Together in Greece
Like the ancient Greeks’ way of governing (which you can read about in Chapter 4) and the Greek way of thinking (see Chapter 10), a Greek style of warfare grew out of the geography of mainland Greece and its agricultural economy.
Greek soldiers of the sixth and fifth centuries BC were largely small landholders, family farmers who made their livings from fields scraped out of rocky hillsides. Their landholder status made them members of a privileged middle class, the citizenry. Because these farmers were determined to maintain control of their property and their communities, they volunteered as hoplites, heavily armored foot soldiers. Military service for no pay was the mark of full membership in the community.
Every Greek citizen who could afford the equipment — a bronze breastplate, a helmet with a fashionable horsehair crest, a short iron sword, leg protectors called greaves, and the most essential item, a 9-foot-long spear — joined up. The hoplites took their name from one other piece of equipment: the heavy wooden shield they carried by its double handle. They slid one loop over the left forearm to the elbow and grasped the other loop at the rim of the shield in the left hand.
Soldiering shoulder to shoulder
The heavy hoplite weaponry fit the way Greeks fought: in a tight, porcupine-like formation called the phalanx. It grew out of conflicts between competing city-states.
In formal disputes, usually over farmland, the two sides decided the issue through an afternoon’s worth of armored columns facing each other on cleared fields. Each side tried to bulldoze the other to a resolution.
When you hear somebody describe any group of aggressive people (say, reporters covering a big story) as a phalanx, remember that the original phalanxes were much deadlier (if perhaps less obnoxious than modern reporters). In battle formation, one guy’s spear stuck out beyond the guy in the rank in front of him.
Hoplites fought shoulder to shoulder. They couldn’t see well because of their helmets, and they couldn’t move quickly because of the heavy gear. What the hoplites could do was advance behind their shields that protected the bearer’s shield side and his neighbor’s weapon side.
The Greek historian Xenophon put this interdependence in its agricultural context: “Farming teaches a person to help others. In fighting enemies, just as in working the earth, each person needs the help of others.”
When two Greek phalanxes clashed, one would break through the other. The disrupted phalanx became ineffective because its helmet-blinded, armor-encumbered members were likely to become confused and fight each other. That happened at the Battle of Delium in 424 BC, when the Spartans broke through the Athenian line and the separated Athenians grabbed their swords and commenced hacking at anything that moved, including their comrades.
Standing up to the Persians
In time, the phalanx proved effective against other cultures’ military formations, including quicker-moving light infantry (foot soldiers without such heavy gear) and even attackers on horseback.
Hoplites passed their biggest test in 490 BC, when King Darius I of Persia invaded mainland Greece. Athenian and allied hoplites, outnumbered two to one, confronted the Persians at Marathon.
Persians organized their armies along lines developed by the Assyrians (refer to the earlier section “Assembling the units”), with horses, archers, swordsmen, engineers — the whole, coordinated, multi-tiered shebang. To Darius’s forces, this bunch of spear-carrying soldiers who looked like shields with stubby bronze legs promised easy pickings. But the Greeks wouldn’t fall back. When a hoplite stumbled, the hoplite in the rank behind him stepped over him and shored up the advance. The Greeks pushed forward until their flanks — the far ends of their line — overwhelmed the most vulnerable part of the Persian forces and then folded the Persians in toward the middle. At that point, Darius’s army wisely turned around and high-tailed it for their boats.
The outnumbered Greeks beat the Persians again 11 years later at Platea. The Greek phalanx made heavy infantry the essential force of its time. For centuries, commanders saw cavalry and archers as support for well-armored foot soldiers.
Facing Macedonian ferocity
When the Greeks finally fell to a foreign force, it wasn’t the mighty Persians but a strongman king to the north of Greece, Philip of Macedon, applying his own version of the phalanx.
Imagine Clint Eastwood at his most squinty, most unmercifully flinty, in the role of Philip, a hard guy. Phil put cavalry behind his infantry, and each rider was armed with a xyston, a 12-foot-long lance with a foot-long iron point at both ends. The cavalry’s job was twofold:
To support the foot soldiers
To kill any comrade among them who turned and ran
Macedon arranged its infantry in a phalanx but made crucial improvements. Philip’s soldiers strapped a small, round shield that wasn’t as heavy (or as protective) as the bigger hoplite shield, to the left shoulder, leaving both hands free to wield a long pike called a sarissa. The sarissa was like the cavalry xyston but longer, at 13–21 feet in length, with a special metal spike on its butt end. A soldier could plant the spike in the ground and then impale a charging horseman with the sword-like business end. The sarissa was so long that the tips of weapons carried by the soldiers in the fourth rank of a Macedonian phalanx often extended beyond the first rank (see Figure 16-1).
Macedon’s army also took the best of Assyrian-Persian weaponry and tactics. Philip of Macedon deployed archers, javelin throwers, and slingers (experts at whipping about a leather sling to propel small-but-deadly stones at an enemy). As the Assyrians had, he absorbed conquered armies and told them to use their own weapons and formations to support his own force. Philip also employed Assyrian-style combat engineers. His inventors improved the siege engine, adding a drawbridge to the top and many platforms for archers to stand on. This new siege engine didn’t have to be right up next to the target city’s wall; if it came fairly close to the wall, attackers could let down the drawbridge and cross it onto the battlements.
Figure 16-1:Macedon’s phalanx was a marching hedgehog of muscular men, wood, and metal.
Even more inventive than the improved siege engine, Macedon’s engineers built a catapult that unleashed the tension of wound animal hair or sinew to hurl a large rock 1,000 feet.
Philip’s approach to warfare spurred the successes of his son, Alexander the Great (I tell you about Alex in Chapters 4 and 20). Alex took the conquered Greeks with him as he turned the tables on the Persians, thoroughly defeated them, and marched through Mesopotamia and beyond to grab part of India. Alex’s troops weren’t even fazed by the Indians’ ultimate weapon: armored battle elephants.
Making War the Roman Way
The Latins, shepherds who built a city on the Tiber River in what’s now Italy, were among many Mediterranean people who admired and imitated the way the Greeks fought.
At the end of the sixth century BC, Latins organized themselves into a Greek-style phalanx and challenged their northern overlords, the Etruscans. The Latins won, and their city, Rome, became the center of a new culture built on military prowess.
Marching in three ranks
The Latin shepherds became the Romans, who soon found that the phalanx was nifty for fighting the Etruscans (another Greek-influenced people), but it wasn’t perfect for fighting less-advanced neighboring tribes.
Greeks developed the phalanx on farmland — battlefields. The Romans’ tribal neighbors weren’t interested in marching formation-to-formation on a cleared hillside. Faster moving than the shield-carrying Romans, a gaggle of tribesmen could come around the flank or hide behind trees and dart out in a raid.
Even the Greeks eventually found the traditional phalanx less and less effective — especially as their armed forces evolved, in the later decades of Classical Greece, from neighborly bands of farmer-citizen-soldiers to a mix of citizens and resident aliens, some of whom were paid mercenaries. A shoulder-to-shoulder, soldier-to-soldier style didn’t work so well when you weren’t quite sure about the guy next to you.
Needing their own, more flexible military style, the Romans came up with the legion in the fourth century BC. The legion consisted of three lines of foot soldiers. Only the third line carried traditional spears. The first two lines carried a variation called ajavelin (or pilum) designed for throwing and boasting a cool technological advance: The head was designed to bend and break off, making the javelin useless to the enemy after it struck its mark. The bent spearhead also tended to stick in an opponent’s shield, armor, or flesh.
The Roman legion worked like this:
Hastati: The first line, made up of young guys, threw their javelins, and then drew their swords and charged. If they had to fall back, they scrambled for a position behind the second rank.
Principes: The more-experienced second rank also threw their javelins, and then charged. If they, too, found they had to fall back, they got behind the third rank.
Triarii: The third rank of steady old hands stood fast in a solid defensive line to let the other guys retreat in safety. But Rome’s battles rarely came to that.
The legion usually won, but even when Rome didn’t win, the other side suffered. In 280 BC, Pyrrhus, king of Epirus, defeated troops led by the Roman Consul Laevinus (consul was top administrative post in the Roman republic). Both sides suffered horrible losses. After the dust cleared, 15,000 lay dead. Pyrrhus said, “If we win another battle against the Romans, we shall be completely ruined.”
Like the Greek phalanx, the legion began as a citizen corps. Most soldiers came from the small landholder class, and just about every man served. Each citizen (as in Greece, women weren’t citizens) between age 17 and 45 had to devote ten years to military service. A leader had to prove himself in battle before he could win political office. Failure at soldiering was failure, period.
Recruiting a standing force
Despite successes — and because of them — Roman commanders realized by the year 100 BC that they needed to change the empire’s military. Battling foes from Germany to Africa to the Black Sea, the Roman Empire grew so fast that its republican legions of citizen-soldiers couldn’t keep up. Troops posted far away on those frontiers couldn’t come home and tend their property after a few months’ campaign.
Besides that, the prosperity that came of Rome’s expansions and the resulting boost in trade made the wealthy patrician class in Rome even wealthier. Rich guys were amassing big estates cultivated by slaves instead of by citizen-farmer-soldiers, the small landholders who traditionally manned the legions. And slaves were exempt from military service.
Rome struggled to fill the legions’ ranks. Recruiters began conveniently overlooking the property ownership requirement for service. Commanders turned to the urban poor to fill out their rosters, but things just weren’t the same. These new guys didn’t have the same stake in the empire. They were harder to discipline.
Gaius Marius, a lowborn soldier who rose to the political office of consul, figured the time had arrived for Rome to ditch the old civil militia idea and officially make the army a full-time, professional gig.
The professional army worked. The military became an attractive career choice and a means of upward mobility. There was a downside, however. Instead of the citizen-soldiers’ loyalty to Rome, the new pros were loyal to their commanders first. The republic became vulnerable to civil wars. A military leader whose troops were more loyal to him than to the government may have fancied himself a dictator or emperor. Rome officially became an empire (that is, ruled by an autocratic emperor) with the coronation of Augustus Caesar in 31 BC (see Chapter 19).
Diversifying the legion
The rise of Augustus wasn’t the end of the citizen-soldier. Roman strategy in the later centuries of the Western Roman Empire (the Eastern Roman Empire became the Byzantine Empire) involved much defensive work. Resident defenders were important in the work of holding fortified outposts and cities against barbarian attack.
How warlike were the tribes that hammered away at Rome’s borders? The Langobard people were named after their weapon: Langobard means “long axe.” Saxons took their name not from a sexy-sounding musical instrument (not invented until the nineteenth century) but from a machete-like knife, a sax. Imagine a modern nation called the Thermonuclear Missiles.
In Chapter 5, I talk about the waves of people who came down through Europe, each clashing with the previous residents and some settling and becoming defenders against later waves. The Roman Empire’s task of standing up to these assaults took plenty of personnel. Residents in places such as Gaul (now France) pitched in to defend their towns. The old idea that warriors fought better in defense of their own land came back.
When Attila the Hun invaded Gaul in 451, he and his fearsome allies spent months trying to break down the defenses of walled cities. They ran out of food and had no forage left for their horses. While Attila hammered away at the city of Orleans, the army of Roman General Aetius, consisting of Germanic soldiers raised mostly in Gaul, attacked and pursued the Huns to Châlons. There the Huns turned and fought, but they were too depleted to prevail. (Note, however, that it took Roman cavalry to beat Attila.) You can find more on Attila the Hun in Chapter 20.
Returning to riders
Military strategists considered cavalry secondary to infantry for centuries. But after the murderous Huns swept into Europe on horseback, terrorizing everyone with their swift fury, war strategists woke up again to the importance of speed.
By the sixth century AD, Rome no longer ruled Western Europe, but the eastern branch of its empire, based in Constantinople, endured. There, swift-riding horse units patrolled the vast borders of the Byzantine Empire (more about the Byzantine Empire in Chapter 6), backed up by lightly armored archers who could move more quickly than the heavy infantry that were the backbone of traditional Roman and Greek forces. The old-style shield-carriers now operated mostly as garrison defense.
Tracking the Centuries
About 10,000 BC: The bow and the sling are added to the warrior’s arsenal.
Tenth century BC: Assyrian warriors overrun neighboring peoples, building an empire stretching from Egypt to the mountains between the Caspian and Black Seas.
424 BC: Spartans break through the Athenian line at the Battle of Delium. The disoriented troops from Athens drop their spears, grab their swords, and begin hacking indiscriminately, wounding many of their own.
409 BC: Although badly outnumbered, Athenians and their allies defeat King Darius I’s invading Persian forces at Marathon.
451 AD: In Gaul (today’s France), Aetius, a Roman general commanding Germanic troops, drives Attila the Hun away from his siege on Orleans. Aetius then pursues the Huns and defeats them at Châlons.
1980s: Anthropologist K.E. Otterbein discovers that 92 percent of hunter-gatherer societies and primitive farming people studied waged war.