ONE
When the trumpet sounded, the soldiers took up their arms and went out. As they charged faster and faster, they gave a loud cry, and on their own broke into a run toward the camp. But a great fear took hold of the barbarian hosts; the Cilician queen fled outright in her carriage, and those in the market threw down their wares and also took to flight. At that point, the Greeks in great laughter approached the camp. And the Cilician queen was filled with admiration at the brilliant spectacle and order of the phalanx; and Cyrus was delighted to see the abject terror of the barbarians when they saw the Greeks.
—XENOPHON, Anabasis (1.2.16–18)
ENLIGHTENED THUGS
EVEN THE PLIGHT of enterprising killers can tell us something. In the summer of 401 B.C., 10,700 Greek hoplite soldiers—infantrymen heavily armed with spear, shield, and body armor—were hired by Cyrus the Younger to help press his claim to the Persian throne. The recruits were in large part battle-hardened veterans of the prior twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.). As mercenaries, they were mustered from throughout the Greek-speaking world. Many were murderous renegades and exiles. Both near adolescents and the still hale in late middle age enlisted for pay. Large numbers were unemployed and desperate at any cost for lucrative work as killers in the exhausted aftermath of the internecine war that had nearly ruined the Greek world. Yet there were also a few privileged students of philosophy and oratory in the ranks, who would march into Asia side by side these destitute mercenaries—aristocrats like Xenophon, student of Socrates, and Proxenus, the Boeotian general, as well as physicians, professional officers, would-be colonists, and wealthy Greek friends of Prince Cyrus.
After a successful eastward march of more than 1,500 miles that scattered all opposition, the Greeks smashed through the royal Persian line at the battle of Cunaxa, north of Babylon. The price for destroying an entire wing of the Persian army was a single Greek hoplite wounded by an arrow. The victory of the Ten Thousand in the climactic showdown for the Persian throne, however, was wasted when their employer, Cyrus, rashly pursued his brother, Artaxerxes, across the battle line and was cut down by the Persian imperial guard.
Suddenly confronted by a host of enemies and hostile former allies, stranded far from home without money, guides, provisions, or the would-be king, and without ample cavalry or missile troops, the orphaned Greek expeditionary infantrymen nevertheless voted not to surrender to the Persian monarchy. Instead, they prepared to fight their way back to the Greek world. That brutal trek northward through Asia to the shores of the Black Sea forms the centerpiece of Xenophon’s Anabasis (“The March Up-Country”), the author himself one of the leaders of the retreating Ten Thousand.
Though surrounded by thousands of enemies, their original generals captured and beheaded, forced to traverse through the contested lands of more than twenty different peoples, caught in snowdrifts, high mountain passes, and waterless steppes, suffering frostbite, malnutrition, and frequent sickness, as well as fighting various savage tribesmen, the Greeks reached the safety of the Black Sea largely intact—less than a year and a half after leaving home. They had routed every hostile Asian force in their way. Five out of six made it out alive, the majority of the dead lost not in battle, but in the high snows of Armenia.
During their ordeal, the Ten Thousand were dumbfounded by the Taochians, whose women and children jumped off the high cliffs of their village in a ritual mass suicide. They found the barbaric white-skinned Mossynoecians, who engaged in sexual intercourse openly in public, equally baffling. The Chalybians traveled with the heads of their slain opponents. Even the royal army of Persia appeared strange; its pursuing infantry, sometimes whipped on by their officers, fled at the first onslaught of the Greek phalanx. What ultimately strikes the reader of the Anabasis is not merely the courage, skill, and brutality of the Greek army—which after all had no business in Asia other than killing and money—but the vast cultural divide between the Ten Thousand and the brave tribes they fought.
Where else in the Mediterranean would philosophers and students of rhetoric march in file alongside cutthroats to crash headlong into enemy flesh? Where else would every man under arms feel equal to anyone else in the army—or at least see himself as free and in control of his own destiny? What other army of the ancient world elected its own leaders? And how could such a small force by elected committee navigate its way thousands of miles home amid thousands of hostile enemies?
Once the Ten Thousand, as much a “marching democracy” as a hired army, left the battlefield of Cunaxa, the soldiers routinely held assemblies in which they voted on the proposals of their elected leaders. In times of crises, they formed ad hoc boards to ensure that there were sufficient archers, cavalry, and medical corpsmen. When faced with a variety of unexpected challenges both natural and human—impassable rivers, a dearth of food, and unfamiliar tribal enemies—councils were held to debate and discuss new tactics, craft new weapons, and adopt modifications in organization. The elected generals marched and fought alongside their men—and were careful to provide a fiscal account of their expenditures.
The soldiers in the ranks sought face-to-face shock battle with their enemies. All accepted the need for strict discipline and fought shoulder-to-shoulder whenever practicable. Despite their own critical shortage of mounted troops, they nevertheless felt only disdain for the cavalry of the Great King. “No one ever died in battle from the bite or kick of a horse,” Xenophon reminded his beleaguered foot soldiers (Anabasis 3.2.19). Upon reaching the coast of the Black Sea, the Ten Thousand conducted judicial inquiries and audits of its leadership’s performance during the past year, while disgruntled individuals freely voted to split apart and make their own way back home. A lowly Arcadian shepherd had the same vote as the aristocratic Xenophon, student of Socrates, soon-to-be author of treatises ranging from moral philosophy to the income potential of ancient Athens.
To envision the equivalent of a Persian Ten Thousand is impossible. Imagine the likelihood of the Persian king’s elite force of heavy infantry— the so-called Immortals, or Amrtaka, who likewise numbered 10,000— outnumbered ten to one, cut off and abandoned in Greece, marching from the Peloponnese to Thessaly, defeating the numerically superior phalanxes of every Greek city-state they invaded, as they reached the safety of the Hellespont. History offers a more tragic and real-life parallel: the Persian general Mardonius’s huge invasion army of 479 B.C. that was defeated by the numerically inferior Greeks at the battle of Plataea and then forced to retire home three hundred miles northward through Thessaly and Thrace. Despite the army’s enormous size and the absence of any organized pursuit, few of the Persians ever returned home. They were clearly no Ten Thousand. Their king had long ago abandoned them; after his defeat at Salamis, Xerxes had marched back to the safety of his court the prior autumn.
Technological superiority does not in itself explain the miraculous Greek achievement, although Xenophon at various places suggests that the Ten Thousand’s heavy bronze, wood, and iron panoply was unmatched by anything found in Asia. There is no evidence either that the Greeks were by nature “different” from King Artaxerxes’ men. The later pseudoscientific notion that the Europeans were racially superior to the Persians was entertained by no Greeks of the time. Although they were mercenary veterans and bent on booty and theft, the Ten Thousand were no more savage or warlike than other raiders and plunderers of the time; much less were they kinder or more moral people than the tribes they met in Asia. Greek religion did not put a high premium on turning the other cheek or on a belief that war per se was either abnormal or amoral. Climate, geography, and natural resources tell us as little. In fact, Xenophon’s men could only envy the inhabitants of Asia Minor, whose arable land and natural wealth were in dire contrast to their poor soil back in Greece. Indeed, they warned their men that any Greeks who migrated eastward might become lethargic “Lotus-Eaters” in such a far wealthier natural landscape.
The Anabasis makes it clear, however, that the Greeks fought much differently than their adversaries and that such unique Hellenic characteristics of battle—a sense of personal freedom, superior discipline, matchless weapons, egalitarian camaraderie, individual initiative, constant tactical adaptation and flexibility, preference for shock battle of heavy infantry—were themselves the murderous dividends of Hellenic culture at large. The peculiar way Greeks killed grew out of consensual government, equality among the middling classes, civilian audit of military affairs, and politics apart from religion, freedom and individualism, and rationalism. The ordeal of the Ten Thousand, when stranded and near extinction, brought out the polis that was innate in all Greek soldiers, who then conducted themselves on campaign precisely as civilians in their respective city-states.
In some form or another, the Ten Thousand would be followed by equally brutal European intruders: Agesilaus and his Spartans, Chares the mercenary captain, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and centuries of legionary dominance, the Crusaders, Hernán Cortés, Portuguese explorers in Asiatic seas, British redcoats in India and Africa, and scores of other thieves, buccaneers, colonists, mercenaries, imperialists, and explorers. Most subsequent Western expeditionary forces were outnumbered and often deployed far from home. Nevertheless, they outfought their numerically superior enemies and in varying degrees drew on elements of Western culture to slaughter mercilessly their opponents.
In the long history of European military practice, it is almost a truism that the chief military worry of a Western army for the past 2,500 years was another Western army. Few Greeks were killed at Marathon (490 B.C.). Thousands died at the later collisions at Nemea and Coronea (394 B.C.), where Greek fought Greek. The latter Persian Wars (480–479 B.C.) saw relatively few Greek deaths. The Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) between Greek states was an abject bloodbath. Alexander himself killed more Europeans in Asia than did the hundreds of thousands of Persians under Darius III. The Roman Civil Wars nearly ruined the republic in a way that even Hannibal had not. Waterloo, the Somme, and Omaha Beach only confirm the holocaust that occurs when Westerner meets Westerner.
This book attempts to explain why that is all so, why Westerners have been so adept at using their civilization to kill others—at warring so brutally, so often without being killed. Past, present, and future, the story of military dynamism in the world is ultimately an investigation into the prowess of Western arms. Scholars of war may resent such a broad generalization. Academics in the university will find that assertion chauvinistic or worse—and thus cite every exception from Thermopylae to Little Big Horn in refutation. The general public itself is mostly unaware of their culture’s own singular and continuous lethality in arms. Yet for the past 2,500 years—even in the Dark Ages, well before the “Military Revolution,” and not simply as a result of the Renaissance, the European discovery of the Americas, or the Industrial Revolution—there has been a peculiar practice of Western warfare, a common foundation and continual way of fighting, that has made Europeans the most deadly soldiers in the history of civilization.
THE PRIMACY OF BATTLE
War as Culture
I am not interested here in whether European military culture is morally superior to, or far more wretched than, that of the non-West. The conquistadors, who put an end to human sacrifice and torture on the Great Pyramid in Mexico City, sailed from a society reeling from the Grand Inquisition and the ferocious Reconquista, and left a diseased and nearly ruined New World in their wake. I am also less concerned in ascertaining the righteousness of particular wars—whether a murderous Pizarro in Peru (who calmly announced, “The time of the Inca is over”) was better or worse than his murdering Inca enemies, whether India suffered enormously or benefited modestly from English colonization, or whether the Japanese had good cause to bomb Pearl Harbor or the Americans to incinerate Tokyo. My curiosity is not with Western man’s heart of darkness, but with his ability to fight—specifically how his military prowess reflects larger social, economic, political, and cultural practices that themselves seemingly have little to do with war.
That connection between values and battle is not original, but has an ancient pedigree. The Greek historians, whose narratives are centered on war, nearly always sought to draw cultural lessons. In Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, nearly 2,500 years ago the Spartan general Brasidas dismissed the military prowess of the tribes of Illyria and Macedonia, who confronted his Spartan hoplites. These men, Brasidas says of his savage opponents, have no discipline and so cannot endure shock battle. “As all mobs do,” they changed their fearsome demeanor to cries of fright when they faced the cold iron of disciplined men in rank. Why so? Because, as Brasidas goes on to tell his soldiers, such tribes are the product of cultures “in which the many do not rule the few, but rather the few the many” (Thucydides 4.126).
In contrast to these enormous armies of screaming “barbarians” without consensual governments and written constitutions—“formidable in outward bulk, with unbearable loud yelling and the frightful appearance of weapons brandished in the air”—“citizens of states like yours,” Brasidas assures his men, “stand their ground.” Notice that Brasidas says nothing about skin color, race, or religion. Instead, he simplistically connects military discipline, fighting in rank, and the preference for shock battle with the existence of popular and consensual government, which gave the average infantryman in the phalanx a sense of equality and a superior spirit to his enemies. Whether or not we wish to dismiss Brasidas’s self-serving portrait of frenzied tribesmen as a chauvinistic Western “construct” or “fiction,” or debate whether his own Spartan oligarchy was a broad-based government, or carp that European infantrymen were often ambushed and bushwhacked by more nimble guerrillas, it is indisputable that there was a tradition of disciplined heavy infantrymen among the constitutionally governed Greek city-states, and not such a thing among tribal peoples to the north.
In an analysis of culture and conflict why should we concentrate on a few hours of battle and the fighting experience of the average soldier— and not the epic sweep of wars, with their cargo of grand strategy, tactical maneuver, and vast theater operations that so much better lend themselves to careful social and cultural exegesis? Military history must never stray from the tragic story of killing, which is ultimately found only in battle. The culture in which militaries fight determines whether thousands of mostly innocent young men are alive or rotting after their appointed hour of battle. Abstractions like capitalism or civic militarism are hardly abstract at all when it comes to battle, but rather concrete realities that ultimately determined whether at Lepanto twenty-year-old Turkish peasants survived or were harpooned in the thousands, whether Athenian cobblers and tanners could return home in safety after doing their butchery at Salamis or were to wash up in chunks on the shores of Attica.
There is an inherent truth in battle. It is hard to disguise the verdict of the battlefield, and nearly impossible to explain away the dead, or to suggest that abject defeat is somehow victory. Wars are the sum of battles, battles the tally of individual human beings killing and dying. As observers as diverse as Aldous Huxley and John Keegan have pointed out, to write of conflict is not to describe merely the superior rifles of imperial troops or the matchless edge of the Roman gladius, but ultimately the collision of a machine-gun bullet with the brow of an adolescent, or the carving and ripping of artery and organ in the belly of an anonymous Gaul. To speak of war in any other fashion brings with it a sort of immorality: the idea that when hit, soldiers simply go to sleep, rather than are shredded, that generals order impersonal battalions and companies of automatons into the heat of battle, rather than screaming nineteen-year-olds into clouds of gas and sheets of lead bullets, or that a putrid corpse has little to do with larger approaches to science and culture.
Euphemism in battle narrative or the omission of graphic killing altogether is a near criminal offense of the military historian. It is no accident that gifted writers of war—from Homer, Thucydides, Caesar, Victor Hugo, and Leo Tolstoy to Stephen Runciman, James Jones, and Stephen Ambrose—equate tactics with blood, and strategy with corpses. How can we write of larger cultural issues that surround war without describing the way in which young men kill and die, without remembering how many thousands are robbed of their youth, their robust physiques turned into goo in a few minutes on the battlefield?
We owe it to the dead to discover at all costs how the practice of government, science, law, and religion instantaneously determines the fate of thousands on the battlefield—and why. During the Gulf War (1990–91) the designer of an American smart bomb, the assembler in its plant of fabrication, the logistician who ordered, received, stockpiled, and loaded it onto a jet, all functioned in a manner unlike their Iraqi opposites—if there were such exact counterparts—and so ensured that an innocent conscript in Saddam Hussein’s army would find himself blown to pieces with little chance to escape the attack, display heroism in his demise, or kill the pilot who killed him. Why Iraqi adolescents were targets in the flashing video consoles of sophisticated American helicopters, and not vice versa, or why GIs from icy Minnesota were better equipped to fight in the desert than recruits from nearby sweltering Baghdad, is mostly a result of cultural heritage, not military courage, much less an accident of geography or genes. War is ultimately killing. Its story becomes absurd when the wages of death are ignored by the historian.
The “Great Battles”
The idea of studying arbitrary “decisive battles” has fallen into disrepute—classic studies like Sir Edward Creasy’s The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, Thomas Knox’s Decisive Battles Since Waterloo, or J. F. C. Fuller’s Decisive Battles of the World: From Salamis to Madrid. Such compendiums once sought to show how the course of civilization rested on a successful charge or two in a given landmark battle—those acts of individual cowardice, bravery, and luck that Creasy called “human probabilities,” which warred with larger “causes and effects” or the determinist currents that he called “fatalism.”
The Great Battles were also selected as worthwhile objects of moral and ethical study. “There is,” Creasy admitted in his preface, “undeniable greatness in the disciplined courage, and in the love of honor, which makes the combatants confront agony and destruction” (vii). Battles bring out the coward or hero in all of us. The nineteenth-century logic was that there is no better way to form our character than through reading of the heroism and cowardice inherent in fighting of the past. At first glance, it is hard to argue with either of Creasy’s premises that single battles change history and offer timeless moral instruction. Had Themistocles not been present at Salamis, the Greeks in the vulnerable infancy of Western civilization may well have been defeated and then subjugated as the westernmost satrapy of Persia, with catastrophic results for the subsequent history of Europe. Likewise, we can learn the lessons of martial audacity by reading of the frightening charge of Alexander’s phalangites at Gaugamela, or the price of folly in Livy’s account of the Roman command at Cannae. Yet I wish to take up again this nineteenth-century genre of the Great Battles for an entirely different purpose from either uncovering pivotal hours in history or posturing about the gallantry of war. There is also a cultural crystallization in battle, in which the insidious and more subtle institutions that heretofore or were murky and undefined became stark and unforgiving in the finality of organized killing.
No other culture but the West could have brought such discipline, morale, and sheer technological expertise to the art of killing than did the Europeans at the insanity of Verdun—a sustained industrial approach to slaughter unlike even the most horrific tribal massacre. No American Indian tribe or Zulu impi could have marshaled, supplied, armed—and have killed and replaced—hundreds of thousands of men for months on end for a rather abstract political cause of a nation-state. The most gallant Apaches—murderously brave in raiding and skirmishing on the Great Plains—would have gone home after the first hour of Gettysburg.
By the same token, there was little chance that the American government in the darkest days of December 1941—Britain on the ropes, the Nazis outside Moscow, the Japanese in the air over Hawaii—would have ordered thousands of its own naval pilots to crash themselves into Admiral Yamamoto’s vast carrier fleet or commanded B-17s to plunge into German oil refineries. After Hasdrubal’s catastrophic setback at the Metaurus, there was no likelihood that the Carthaginian Assembly, as Rome had done after the far worse slaughter at Cannae, would have ordered a general muster of all its able-bodied citizenry—a real nation-in-arms arising to crush the hated resurgent legions. In battle alone we receive a glimpse of the larger reasons precisely why and how men kill and die that are hard to disguise and harder still to ignore.
About a century ago, Creasy wrote of Alexander’s victory at Gaugamela that it “not only overthrew an Oriental dynasty, but established European rulers in its stead. It broke the monotony of the Eastern world by the impression of Western energy and superior civilization, even as England’s present mission is to break up the mental and moral stagnation of India and Cathay by pouring upon and through them the impulsive current of Anglo-Saxon commerce and conquest” (E. Creasy, The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, 63). Nearly everything in that statement is false—except for one indisputable phrase: “Western energy.” England was in India, India not in England. Alexander’s brigands were hardly emissaries of culture, and went east to loot and plunder, not to “civilize.” But they killed without dying because of a military tradition that for centuries prior had proved unlike any other in the ancient world, itself the product of a different social, economic, and political culture from Achaemenid Persia.
The nine engagements chosen for this book were not selected solely because the fate of civilizations has hinged on their outcomes—although in the instance of Salamis, Gaugamela, and the siege at Mexico City that surely was the case. Nor have I chosen these battles because of their unusual heroism and gallantry—ethical instruction in which we are supposed to appreciate or dismiss people’s moral fiber or national character itself as well. Although an army’s organization, discipline, and arms can surely magnify or whittle down the martial spirit of a man, bravery nonetheless is a more universal human characteristic, and so tells us little about the singular lethality of a particular people’s military or its culture at large. Europeans were intrinsically no smarter or braver than the Africans, Asians, and Native Americans whom they usually butchered. The Aztec warriors who were blown to bits by Cortés’s cannon or the Zulus who were shattered by British Martini-Henry rifles at Rorke’s Drift may have been the most courageous fighters in the history of warfare. The brave American pilots who blew up the Kaga at Midway were no more gallant than the brave Japanese who were engulfed in its flames below.
I am also unable to offer universal military “lessons”; there are no anatomies here of tactical blunders that doomed an entire army—unwise battles like Kursk that ruined the German Panzers in Russia, or Varus’s ill-thought expedition into Germany that resulted in thousands slaughtered and essentially ended the chance that Germany might be incorporated into the Roman Empire. True, there is something to this idea of a timeless “art of warfare” that transcends the centuries and continents, and so is innate to man in battle, rather than specific to culture: concentration of force, the proper use of surprise, or the necessity of safe lines of supply and so on. Yet most such books on battle knowledge have already been written. In most of their efforts at universal truths of how wars are won and lost, they often fail to appreciate the cultural baggage with which an army enters the battlefield.
Instead, I have selected these collisions for what they tell us about culture, specifically the core elements of Western civilization. They are “landmark” for what they reveal about how a society fights, not necessarily because of their historical importance. The battles are snapshots of a cultural tradition of war making, not progressive chapters in a comprehensive history of Western warfare. Not all are European victories. Cannae, for example, was a horrific Roman defeat, Tet an American political embarrassment. Nor are all these engagements clear-cut clashes between Western and non-Western forces. We can learn just as much about the phenomenon of Westernization from militaries like Carthage, imperial Japan, and the North Vietnamese, which all adopted in some part elements of Western battle practice and weaponry that accordingly gave them advantages on the battlefield unmatched by their African and Asian neighbors—and that eventually resulted in their ability to kill thousands of Westerners themselves. In this regard, there must be some common strand that explains why Darius III had Greeks in his employment, why the Ottomans transferred their capital city to the newly conquered European Constantinople, why Zulus used Martini-Henry rifles at Rorke’s Drift, why the Soryu looked something like the Enterprise at Midway, and why an AK-47 and M-16 appear almost identical. The opposite was not true: Alexander did not hire the Immortals; the Crusaders did not transfer the capital of France or England to a conquered Tyre or Jerusalem; the British did not outfit regiments with assegais; and the American navy did not institute samurai sword training.
In an effort to identify common and recurring themes, I have sought diversity in the broadest sense: battle at sea, in the air, and on land; battle in the New World, on the Mediterranean and the Pacific, and in Europe, Asia, and Africa; battles that were both relatively small and also huge; battles like Midway that were pivotal and others like Rorke’s Drift that were ultimately irrelevant; battles between colonists and aborigines, or states against empires, or religion against religion. I have also attempted to illustrate Western characteristics of war in their most unlikely occurrence: the value of civic militarism at Cannae when a mercenary army demolished the militia of Rome; the supremacy of landed infantry during the so-called Dark Ages of purported Western impotence when the mounted knight alone was thought to rule the battlefield; the singularity of Western technology and research among the conquistadors, who were products of the Inquisition and the Reconquista; the superiority of Western discipline against the Zulus, Africa’s most disciplined and well organized indigenous army; and the value of dissent and self-critique during the Tet Offensive, when clear military victory on the battlefield was turned into defeat by a sometimes overzealous opposition. It is easy to see that civic militarism or landed infantry saved the West at Plataea, that the militaries of England, France, and Germany embodied the excellence of Western technologies, and that colonial armies were better disciplined than Pacific islanders. Yet we can learn more of the resilience of Europe and its culture from these worst-case scenarios in which the Western way of war at first glance seems hardly dynamic at all, if at times counterproductive to the struggle for victory itself.
The only other constant besides the fault line of mostly non-West versus West conflict is a vague sense of chronology, beginning with the ancient world and ending in the modern age, starting with spears and concluding with jets. This emphasis on classical antiquity is deliberate: while most historians admit of a European dominance in arms from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, fewer profess that since its creation the West has enjoyed martial advantages over its adversaries—or that such dominance is based not merely on superior weaponry but on cultural dynamism itself. The landmark battles do not reflect radical evolutionary changes in war making through the centuries. While Western warfare grew more sophisticated and deadly over time, its main tenets were well established during classical antiquity. Consequently, all our examples reflect a commonality in military practice: freedom of expression, for instance, was integral to the Greek cause at our first battle, Salamis, and characteristic of the American army at our last example, Tet, some 2,500 years later. I shall argue that what led to the present Western superiority in arms (“Part Three: Control”) was not fundamental alteration and improvement in the classical military paradigm (“Part One: Creation”) but rather its gradual spread throughout Europe and the Western hemisphere (“Part Two: Continuity”). This issue of cultural heritage is a controversial but critical historical point, with fundamental consequences for the future, because it suggests that Western lethality shall continue, despite even the proliferation of advanced technology into the non-West.
Critics might seek more examples of Western reverses. Yet even horrific individual disasters like Carrhae (53 B.C.) did not affect the ultimate superiority of Western forces. Parthia is beyond the Euphrates, and the legions who died there thousands of miles from home comprised only a fifth of Rome’s available military manpower. Adrianople (378) and Manzikert (1071) were horrendous Western defeats; but the Romans and Byzantines who were slaughtered there were for the most part vastly outnumbered, far from home, poorly led, and reluctant emissaries of crumbling empires. Some might ask, “Where is Dien Bien Phu?,” forgetting that the Vietminh defeated the French in Vietnam, not in France, with Western-designed artillery, rockets, and automatic weapons, not arms indigenous to Southeast Asia—and as patriots with ample Chinese aid defending their fatherland, not as colonial troops without clear support from home. In Oran, Afghanistan, Algiers, Morocco, and India, outnumbered Spanish, French, and British troops were sometimes annihilated—usually surrounded, without logistical support, and opposed by numerically superior opponents making use of European firearms.
For every Isandhlwana, where vastly outnumbered and poorly commanded Westerners were surprised and slaughtered by indigenous troops, there is a Rorke’s Drift, where 139 British soldiers held off 4,000 Zulus. Can we envision the opposite—a handful of Zulus butchering thousands of rifle-carrying redcoats? In any case, both the slaughter of British troops and the killing of Zulus do not in any way nullify a general truth that European armies fought Africans with superior weapons, logistics, organization, and discipline, and thereby overcame the vast numerical advantages and remarkable courage of their enemies. All such wars against the Zulus were fought in Africa—it was surely impossible that the latter could even contemplate an invasion of England. When the Zulu king Cetshwayo wished to go to London, it was as a defeated curiosity, dressed in suit and tie, to delight and shock Victorian society.
IDEAS OF THE WEST
Western Preeminence?
Behind the economic and political hegemony of the West has stood the peculiar force of Western arms, past and present. Militarily, the uniforms of the world’s armies on both sides of the modern battle line are now almost identical—Western khaki, camouflage, and boots are worn when Iraqis fight Iranians or Somalians battle Ethiopians. Companies, brigades, and divisions—the successors to Roman military practice—are the global standards of military organization. Chinese tanks look European; African machine guns have not evolved beyond American models; and Asian jets have not incorporated new propulsion systems with a radically novel Korean or Cambodian way of producing thrust. If a Third World autocrat buys weapons from China, India, or Brazil, he does so only because these countries can copy and provide Western-designed weapons more cheaply than the West itself. Indigenous armies in Vietnam and Central America have had success against Europeans—but largely to the degree that they were supplied with automatic weapons, high explosives, and ammunition produced on Western specifications.
A small school, it is true, has argued that non-European forces were in no way inferior to Western armies. But examination of such case studies of European setbacks—in the Pacific, Africa, Asia, and the Americas— reveals consistent and recurring themes. Europeans were more often outnumbered and fighting outside Europe. If defeated, their victors were usually employing some type of European weaponry; and rarely did Western battle defeats lead to capitulation and armistice. Only a few places in Africa and Asia—Nepal, Tibet, Afghanistan, and Ethiopia—resisted European entry. Others that did—Japan most notably—emulated Western military practice almost entirely. After Thermopylae, and with the exception of the Moors in Spain and Mongols in eastern Europe, there is virtually no example of a non-Western military defeating Europeans in Europewith non-European weapons. That European colonial armies sometimes found themselves vastly outnumbered, often opposed by courageous indigenous warriors equipped with Western firearms, and then were annihilated tells us little about Western military weakness.
Sometimes critics of the idea of Western military predominance point to the easy transference of technology in arguing that, say, American natives became better shots than European settlers or that Moroccans quickly mastered Portuguese artillery. Such arguments have the paradoxical effect of proving the opposite of what is intended: Englishmen were in the New World and selling guns to natives, not vice versa. Moroccans were not in Lisbon teaching Portuguese the arts of indigenous Islamic heavy gunnery. Here the human quality of utilizing, mastering, and improving a tool is confused with the cultural question of providing an intellectual, political, and social context for scientific discovery, popular dissemination of knowledge, practical application, and the art of mass fabrication.
As we shall see with Carthage and Japan, the very controversial question of Westernization has a reductionist and sometimes absurd quality about it: there is no military concept of “Easternization” within the armed forces of the West, at least in which entire Western cultures adopt wholesale the military practices and technology of the non-West. Meditation, religion, and philosophy are not the same as industrial production, scientific research, and technological innovation. It matters little where a weapon was first discovered, but a great deal how it was mass-produced, constantly improved, and employed by soldiers. Few scholars, however, can disconnect the question of morality from energy. Thus, any investigation of why the military of the West has exercised such power is far too often suspect of cultural chauvinism.
Nature Over Culture?
Is Western hegemony a product of luck, geography, natural resources, or itself a late phenomenon due largely to the discovery and subsequent conquest of the New World (1492–1700) or to the Industrial Revolution (1750–1900)? Many cite the West’s natural and geographical benefaction. In this line of thinking—made most popular by Fernand Braudel and most recently by Jared Diamond—the West’s apparent “proximate” advantages in technology like firearms and steel are due largely to more “ultimate” causes that are largely accidental. For example, the Eurasian axis favored a long crop season, a different sort of animal husbandry, and species diversity. The resulting rise in urban population and animal domestication created a lethal brew of germs that would decimate outsiders without long-standing exposure and ensuing biological immunity. European topography both prevented easy access by hostile nomads and promoted rival cultures, whose competition and warring led to constant innovation and response. Europe was blessed with abundant ores that made iron and steel production possible, and so on.
Natural determinists are to be congratulated in their efforts for the most part to dismiss genes. Europeans were not by any means naturally smarter than Asians, Africans, or the natives of the New World. They were not genetically dumber either—as Jared Diamond, the purportedly natural determinist, has unfortunately hinted at. In an especially disturbing reference to racial intelligence, Diamond argues for the genetic inferiority of Western brains:
New Guineans . . . impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people than the average European or American. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. (J. Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 20)
One wonders what would have been the response of critics had Diamond juxtaposed the words “New Guineans” and “Europeans.” Are we to believe that Columbus lacked the brain function to make a “mental map” of unfamiliar surroundings in an empty ocean?
The efforts of those who seek to reduce history to biology and geography deprecate the power and mystery of culture, and so often turn desperate. While Chinese civilization did give the world gunpowder and printing, it never developed the prerequisite receptive cultural environment that would allow those discoveries to be shared by the populace at large and thus freely to be altered and constantly improved by enterprising individuals to meet changing conditions. This rigidity was not because of “China’s chronic unity,” or a result of a “smooth coastline” and the absence of islands, but because a complex set of conditions favored imperial autocracy that became entrenched in a natural landscape not at all that different from the Mediterranean.
In contrast, Rome, whose continuous rule was comparable in duration to many of the dynasties of imperial China, was an especially innovative empire, which drew strength from its unity and nearly four centuries of tranquillity. Despite the general anti-utilitarian nature of classical science, the Romans developed and then dispersed among millions of people sophisticated building techniques with cement and arches, screw presses and pumps, and factories to produce bulk supplies of everything from arms and armor to dyes, woolen cloth, glass, and furniture, as the government had little control over the dissemination or use of knowledge. The Greeks likewise found even greater power vis-à-vis other cultures during the Hellenistic period, when their national armies devastated the East. Hellenistic applied science under the Successor dynasties made practical strides unknown during the classical period when Greece was composed of over a thousand squabbling and autonomous polities. Political unity outside of China has brought other cultures advantages as well as atrophy. Neither the geography nor the political history of China alone accounts for its culture.
We must remember also that farmland in America is as rich as Europe’s—and gave many New World palatial dynasties prosperity. China, India, and Africa are especially blessed in natural ores, and enjoy growing seasons superior to those of northern Europe. True, Rome and Greece are situated in the central Mediterranean and thus were a nexus of sorts for traders arriving from Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa—but so was Carthage, whose location was as fortunate as Rome’s. The fact is we shall never know the precise reasons why Western civilization in Greece and Rome developed so radically on a diverse path from its neighbors to the north, south, and east, especially when the climate and geography of Greece and Italy were not especially different from those of ancient Spain, southern France, western Persia, Phoenicia, or North Africa.
In this most recent sort of biological determinism, natural advantages like irrigated arable land in the Fertile Crescent or expansive plains in Persia and China encourage political unity, which is a “bad” thing, while climatological and geographical adversity lead to war and fighting, which is ultimately good. Yet the East possesses no uniform geography—who indeed can sort out the differing characteristics of a small isolated valley in Greece from its nearly identical counterpart in Persia or China? Modern biologists have unknowingly returned to the Greeks’ crude historical determinism, the theories of Hippocrates, Herodotus, and Plato that asserted the harsh Greek mainland made Hellenes tough, even as the bounty of Persia enervated its population.
Few ancient societies, in fact, were situated in a more disadvantageous position than Greece, neighbor to a hostile Achaemenid empire of 70 million, directly north of the warring states of the Near East, with less than half its land arable, without a single large navigable river, cursed with almost no abundance of natural resources other than a few deposits of gold, metals, and timber, its coastline vulnerable to the Persian fleet, its northern plains open to migrating nomads from Europe and southern Asia, its tiny and vulnerable island polities closer to Asia than Europe. Are we then to blame its mountains, which discouraged vast hydraulic farming and contained few riches, or commend the rocky terrain for ensuring political fragmentation that led to innovation? The old Victorian idea that Greece wore itself out with internecine killing is now to be replaced by the popular biological notion that such natural diversity led to “rivalry” that gave the West the advantages of embracing innovation.
Grain harvests in Ptolemaic Egypt (305–31 B.C.) reached astounding levels of production. Far from an exhausted Nile valley ending the power of the Egyptian dynasties, it bloomed as never before under Greek and Roman agricultural practice. If the pharaohs were doomed because of the disadvantages of nature and an exhausted soil, the Ptolemies who walked their identical ancient ground most assuredly were not—Alexandria, in a way Karnak could not be, for nearly five hundred years was the cultural and economic hub of the entire Mediterranean. How was that possible when thousands of prior harvests should have exhausted the Nile basin for Greek colonialists? Why did not the pharaohs utilize the great delta of Alexandria to create an emporium on the Mediterranean to facilitate trade between Asia, Europe, and Africa? Clearly, culture in Egypt—not geography, not weather, and not resources—had changed from 1200 to 300 B.C.
Vast cultural changes could also occur not only in the same place but among the same people. Mycenaean Linear B of the thirteenth century B.C. was a clumsy, largely pictographic script used by a small cadre to record royal inventories; the Greek language of the seventh century B.C. was widely disseminated and facilitated philosophy, science, literature, and poetry. Obviously, the climate, geography, and animals of central Greece did not mutate all that much in five hundred years. What allowed a written language in mainland Greece to evolve so differently from others elsewhere in the Mediterranean and from past Hellenic civilization was a radical revolution in social, political, and economic organization. Mycenaeans and polis Greeks lived in exactly the same place and spoke roughly the same language, but their respective values and ideas were a world apart. The biology and the environment of Greece may explain why both cultures farmed olive trees, herded sheep, relied on stone, mud brick, and tiles for construction materials, and even had the same words for mountains, cow, and sea, but it does not explain the vast difference between Mycenaean state agriculture and the family farms of the polis— much less why classical Greek militaries were far more dynamic than those of the earlier palaces.
No one denies the great role that geography, climate, and natural history play in history—Scandinavians obviously developed ideas of time, travel, and war different from the natives of Java. The absence of horses ensured that the Incas and Aztecs would lack the mobility of their Spanish adversaries. Yet the fact is that the ancient civilizations of the Near East, India, China, and Asia often encompassed for long periods of time areas of similar latitude, climate, and terrain as the West, with more or less the same advantages and disadvantages in resources and location. Land, climate, weather, natural resources, fate, luck, a few rare individuals of brilliance, natural disaster, and more—all these play their role in the formation of a distinct culture, but it is impossible to determine exactly whether man, nature, or chance is the initial catalyst for the origins of Western civilization. What is clear, however, is that once developed, the West, ancient and modern, placed far fewer religious, cultural, and political impediments to natural inquiry, capital formation, and individual expression than did other societies, which often were theocracies, centralized palatial dynasties, or tribal unions.
A Late Ascendancy?
Others have argued that the rise of Western military power is relatively late and a quirk of either the spread of gunpowder (1300–1600), the discovery of the New World (1492–1600), or the Industrial Revolution (1750–1900), dismissing the possibility of cultural continuity from Greece and Rome that might explain why there was a military or industrial revolution in Europe and not in Egypt, China, or Brazil. As is true of any civilization, there have been wide swings in the influence of the West, from a Dark Ages from A.D. 500 to 800, to a relatively isolated and somewhat backward era between 800 and 1000, when Europeans fought off the invasions of northern and eastern nomads and Muslims. Yet two points need to be stressed about the notion of a rather late Western military dominance in arms that is characterized largely by technological superiority. First, for nearly a thousand years (479 B.C. to A.D. 500) the military dominance of the West was unquestioned, as the relatively tiny states in Greece and Italy exercised military supremacy over their far larger and more populous neighbors. The scientific, technological, political, and cultural foundations of classical culture were not entirely lost, but passed directly from the Roman Empire to European kingdoms or were rediscovered during the Carolingian period and later the Italian Renaissance.
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 escaping 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.