I used to read a lot more history books like these than I do now. Not because I like them any less. Maybe it is because books like this take a bit more time than I have. Who know? Anyhow, this was a great book I read back in 2000. I have to make time to read more liked these. It was interesting and accessible. Here is what I wrote in my journal back then:

>>. . .about three generals and how they lead citizen armies to vanquish tyranny. In common, Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton were geniuses in their own time who were educated, capable, daring, and often used flank attacks and approaches to their enemies heartland rather than frontal assaults to achieve their objectives. Their citizen armies were formed swiftly, became lethal combatants and soon dissolved after conflict. The book is well written, and Hanson constantly makes connections between the generals and their time. A very interesting book that presented its arguments well. ( )

In his usual impressive way Hanson here compares the vital campaigns of Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton to demonstrate the soul of battle. The little-known nor appreciated Epaminondas is extensively covered here, an individual Hanson took up in his first, and intriguing novel; Sherman is shown to be the consummate leader, and the wild Patton, impressively calculating, and dead on in his battle field prowess. The substance of the book promotes the intriguing notion that armies, dedicated to freedom, and fighting for a higher, righteous cause are uniquely qualified for battle. Hanson is an articulate writer and he subtlety weaves the three disparate generals into a coherent whole.

One of the most important points about Patton (p. 308) is Hanson's identification that had the Allied command had followed his advice the war might have been shortened considerably.

It is instructive to consider Hanson's book in light of the American quagmire in Afghanistan and the lack of leadership exercised by Obama.

Prologue

Democracy, and the twin of market capitalism, alone can instantaneously create lethal armies out of civilians, equip them with horrific engines of war, imbue them with a near-messianic zeal within a set time and place to exterminate what they understand as evil, have them follow to their deaths the most ruthless of men, and then melt anonymously backing the culture that produced them. It if then democracies, which in the right circumstances, can be imbued with the soul of battle, and thus turn the horror of killing to a higher purpose of saving lives and freeing the enslaved.

“—for a season can produce the most murderous armies from the most unlikely of men, and do so in the pursuit of something spiritual rather the mere material...”

Epaminondas killed more Spartan hoplites in a single day at the battle of Leuctra than had the entire Persian army that once invaded Greece over a century earlier, more than Athens had in twenty-seven years of the Peloponnesian War.

“…Sherman’s Army of the West was quite literally the most impressive and deadly body in the history of armed conflicts”

It is a foolhardy thing for a slaveholding society to arouse a democracy of such men.

The legacies of these epic marches for freedom were one with democracy itself, proof positive of the ability of a free society rapidly to muster, invade, conquer, and then disband—a tradition that often in the eleventh hour has kept the democracies of the West free and one we abandon only at our peril.

Yeomen of Thebes

The Boeotian Pig

…idea of a future great crusade of vengeance against Sparta began to take root. In general, there is to free men something odious about an apartheid state…”

For men like Epaminondas, Sherman and Patton, the best way to stop such thuggish bullies was to crash into their home ground and quite vitiate their claims to ethnic, regional or racial superiority , to give them a taste of total war that transcended the battlefield.

The Theban Are Mightier in War

..full-fledged democracy was no longer antithetical to a traditional army of hoplite infantryman---if the army could be reinvented to include more than just property owners.
Epamonondas would draw on to spread freedom and democracy to hundreds of thousands of others in the Peloponnese. Battle would not be for mere lands, much less for conquest, bout now for the soul of people’s miles away to the south.

Princeps Graeciae

Epaminondas rebuked pacifist at Thebes with the warning that they wanted slavery, not peace. “Those who wish to enjoy peace must be ready for war”

An Unrivaled and Inviolate Land

That it took Theban farmers, not Athenian intellectuals, to lead such an army, should remind us all that the source of the moral sense is not always in the theater or in the bookstalls.

And All of Greece Became Independent and Free

Epaminondas received about the same thanks from his government that greeted Sherman and Patton once their marches were over—threatened demotions and accusations of everything from insubordination to collusion with the enemy.

Besides keeping the army in the field beyond the appointed mandate and after his own tenure as Boeotarch had expired in late December, the more lunatic of his enemies later brought additional charges of treason on the grounds he had allowed the Spartans to escape destruction by not burning down their city.

While he was a brilliant general and a rare man of character Epaminondas made a lousy imperialist….

The real irony is that when Epaminondas returned from the Peloponnese after his great crusade of 370-369, the real serpent was not beheaded, but was being hatched in his own courtyard: a young Phillip II of Macedon was a hostage in Thebes, absorbing the very tactical manifesto of the Theban army that Epaminondas had created to destroy autocracy.

For democratic armies on the march to be successful, they should have a sense of military experience is ephemeral, with the assurance that after their march they will be dispersed and sent back to their homes.
The Theban army….was not a gratuitous killing machine.

Machiavelli’s dictum that “men more quickly forget the death of their father than the loss of their patrimony”

Rather like Sherman in Georgia , the strategy of the army was to march through enemy territory , destroying property and humiliating its citizenry, displaying to subject states and underlings alike the impotence of their masters, with the confidence that if the enemy chose to fight, it would lose even more dramatically.

Epaminondas’ Thebans were not all light army or plunderers or skirmishers, not a plodding Phalanx that existed for battle alone, but rather both. He is neither a predecessor to Alexander nor successor to Pericles, but rather innovator of this new movement in force against the human and material capital of the enemy – a paradigm that other democratic musters would follow in centuries to come.

…once he could freely destroy the property of Sparta’s citizens and teach them hat the pride of their society -- their vaunted army – was hollow

The strategic legacy of Epaminondas is thus an entirely new mobile army at all times capable of direct annihilation and indirect attrition… When it does mass in force and seek resistance (Sparta itself), it can be easily bypassed and outflanked to pursue other easier targets (i.e. Laconia farms and harbors). Sherman and Patton both were masters of just that flexibility in attack.

The very qualities that makes poor democratic statesman in peace time- audacity, fatalism, truthfulness, fearlessness, initiative , hatred of compromise, fanaticism, even recklessness- are critical for a command of a great egalitarian army, just as the strengths of a politician- affability, consensus-building, retrospection, manners, inactivity even – can prove lethal on campaigns.

I think it is almost axiomatic that if a general of a great democratic march is not hated, is not sacked, tried, or relieved of command by his auditors after his tenure is over or if he has not been killed or wounded at the van, he has not utilized the full potential of his men, he has not accomplished his strategic goals – in short, he is too representative of the very culture that produced him, too democratic army of marchers and plunderers.

In his range of political and strategic thought, he towered over his Greek contemporaries – an Ipohicrates, Charisa , or Agesilaus-in precisely the way that Sherman did over all generals of the Civil War, precisely as Patton dwarfed his British and American superiors. In short, Epaminondas, the philosopher, may have been the best –educated man of action of the ancient world- an education that stressed logic, mathematics, rhetoric, memorization, philosophy, and literature, an education far more valuable to the leadership of great democratic armies than what is offered in most universities today.

It is no accident that Epaminondas, Sherman and Patton in the end turned out to be better war-makers than their purposely ferocious enemy counterparts- the engine of the Western military dynamism is ultimately fueled best by ethical agenda.

Epitaph of Epaminondas statue:
“By my plans was Sparta shorn of her glory
And holy Messenia at last received back her children
By the arms of Thebes was Megalopolis fortified
And all of Greece, became independent and free”

PART II – THE ARMY OF THE WEST

2. The Idea

…and no army, we should remember, is more mobile and reckless than a democratic muster of young recruits.

3. The Soul of the Army

An army on a great march is no army at all if its soldiers have no affinity for either rural hardship or cross-country tramping- perhaps an ominous warning to the modern age, where the vast majority of democratic populations is comfortable and suburban.

4. Where is the Enemy?

The army of Sherman was now exposing one of the great embarrassments of a chivalric, apartheid society: rhetoric, costumes, polite manners, titles and arcane traditions among a privileged elite hide weakness rather than reflect strength….. it was no accident that on the surrender, Grant looked shabby, slouchy and muddy, Lee resplendent and sworded; Sherman was rumpled, Joe Johnston dapper in his military gray ; as a rule Southern horsemen were more privileged and adroit, union cavalry workmanlike and more numerous; ….

Now the citizenry of Georgia claimed that a few planters all along had been solely responsible for secession-just as shell shocked Germans civilians would complain to Patton’s men that the Nazi’s elite were responsible for the catastrophe.

The historian Gerald Linderman has characterized the female pressures in the South as “sexual intimidation”

5. An Apartheid Society

Only 385,000 out of the 6,000,000 citizens who lived in the confederacy or border state counties sympathetic to the south were themselves slaveholders.

The charade of the Confederacy would be exposed when 62,000 men swept into Georgia, led by the most keen student of human nature and social pretext of any figure of his generation, a military “prophet” who saw war as the ultimate disclosing agent of hypocrisy.

…but like Grant, the grocer from Galena, Illinois’, Sherman feared no set back since he had experienced nearly every setback conceivable.

…other than the sense of desperation and audacity that are about the only valuable dividends from abject failure.

It is a hard thing for contemporary liberalism to envision war as not always evil, but as sometimes very necessary --and very necessarily brutal if great evil is to disappear.
Moderns especially fail to appreciate that the visionaries of a conservative society sometimes profess racism to justify their own moderation; they often claim to be hardened war-mongers to make their own clemency palatable to self and similarly dour of others

We must forget his insensitivity in language, forgive his obnoxious bluster, grant that he could be rude, had a tendency to flirt with pretty women., in occasion wrote nonsense about races, and simply appreciate that he was a great man whose deeds belied his words, a hero whose capture of Atlanta, saved Lincoln’s administration and the Union itself…

7. The End and the Beginning

So I am confused when present-day historians write that they are disturbed, for example, to learn that Sherman’s men killed bloodhounds in Georgia- as if the gratuitous killing of pets, some of which were accomplished trackers of slaves and union prisoners, matters very much when half a million blacks in Georgia had been slaves – until Bill Sherman’s dog-killers set thousands of them free.

Once the free Southern citizenry – and the apartheid Confederacy was a consensual society of sorts among white people-chose to fight and kill on behalf of human bondage, the destruction of its private property, unlike attacks against Northern farms took on the logic of retribution and atonement.

The very fact that he could march unharmed through the South eroded all support in the North for Democrats and copperheads who advocated negotiated peace or surrender under the guise of settlement.

It is true that Sherman redefined the American Way of War, but his legacy is not Viet Nam, but rather the great invasion of Europe during World War Two, in which Americans marched right through the homeland of the Axis powers. Sherman, in short, invented the entire notion of American strategic doctrine, one that would appear so frequently in the century to follow – the deal of a vast moral crusade on foreign soli to restructure a society through sheer force of arms.

..but rather the absence at the contrast between Lee and Sherman. The former who wrecked his army by sending thousands on frontal charges against and entrenched enemy and who himself owned slaves , enjoys the reputation of a reluctant, humane knight who battled for a cause – state’s rights and the sanctity of Southern soil – other than slavery. The latter who was careful to save his soldiers from annihilation and who freed thousands of slaves in Georgia, is too often seen as a murderous warrior who fought for a cause - federalism and the punishment of treason – other than freedom.

Historians would do better to assess each on what they did, not on what they professed.

Democratic armies are not always mobile, and not always successful when mobile, but when organized for a particular, finite mission and led by a zealot they draw like no other military operation on the natural restlessness, impatience, and self-righteousness inherent in a democratic culture’s war against privilege.

Both generals (Epaminondas, Sherman) were criticized by their governments for being too soft on their enemies, and by their enemies for being too harsh agents of their governments.

While the sudden march against apartheid by a militia of free men is the best military expression of a democratic society, it may be that such a mobilization are rare, far too rare, because the require a ruthlessness and a realism of leadership that often progressive politicians, so attuned to the pulse of a powerful electorate that demands victory but wants it cheap and clean. In a democratic culture the very trait necessary to lead a great march in war – eccentricity, audacity, suspicion, of rather disdain for consensus – are precisely those that ensure an individual censure and opprobrium in peace.

It is hard for a free, consensual, and comfortable society to marshal the will to kill evil, and even harder after the sacrifice to agree that the destruction was both just and necessary, much less humane.

,,, Sherman’s own declaration that the proper purpose of battle was to make society right:

“Wars Legitimate Object is more Perfect Peace”

PART III Patton’s Race into Germany

American Ajax

That Patton ever gained command of an army – given his candor and propensity for saying what others felt but by no means wanted articulated - is a testament to his considerable reservoir of talent.

Bradley bragged about that he taught for years as a formal staff instructor; the profane Patton who publicly played the anti-intellectual was, in fact, better read and educated.

In his late fifties as he was leading the Third Army through Normandy, Patton was better educated, more experienced, and older than either Eisenhower or Bradley.

It was if Williams Tecumseh Sherman had been reborn.

Scholars and fellow sympathetic generals who have lamented Patton’s unnecessary coarseness and bombast failed to appreciate the prodigious Patton mind – forgetting that the gifted Patton mind often concocted just that coarseness as a vital ingredient in the makeup of a mobile army commander. The hardest task for modern historians is to realize that where they might find Patton’s staged theatrics personally repulsive, they must concede his achievements change the direction of the war in Europe, and they must allow that his often vulgar outbursts about killing, war, sex and race mask the fact his haste saved thousands of lives. Had his speed been encouraged rather than hindered by the more soft-spoken and mild-mannered men, thousands more would have been saved.

Patton and Sherman may have shared an identical strategic outlook not simply because they had professional and personality similarities, but because both were deeply devoted to saving the lives of the men they led and ending quickly the war that they fought – and that sense ultimately derived more from their moral than their military character.

“Ignorant men” wrote Sophocles “don’t know what good they hold in their hands until they’ve flung it away”

The Patton Way of War

Patton proved the idea of a great democratic march, an ideological trek in which a fiery commander might pour his spirit of vengeance into his citizen soldiers, was not lost, regardless of the sheer magnitude and deadliness of such an undertaking in the murderous new age of mechanized warfare.

A Cog in the Wheel

No, once the Third Army was in Germany and his hot pursuit defeated men, the Germans would collapse, Patton’s huge and now arrogant army chased the Panzers back to their homes, Epaminondas’s experience in Laconia and Sherman’s in Georgia suggest that Patton was right: advancing victorious democratic armies do have a deleterious effect on the spirit of the enemy that can lead to sudden disintegration – but only if they are allowed by wary overseers to continue on when the enemy is in flight.

“Books will someday be written on that ‘pause did not refresh’ anyone but the Germans”. The cutoff of Patton’s supplies during the last week in August and the first week in September was the third occasion since the inauguration of the Third Army that Patton had been overruled by Bradley and Eisenhower – again with disastrous results for the allied cause in general, German division in shambles at the end of August would be reequipped with armor in the Ardennes in December.

The sober British historian Hubert Essame concluded of the end of Patton’s ride: “Providence had given Eisenhower the greatest cavalry leader and as good an army as his country had ever produced: at the decisive moment he failed to use them” Another British military observer, Ian Hogg, agreed: “ There can be little doubt that Eisenhower’s decision was wrong in very particular, and if Patton have been given his supplies, and his head, there is every likelihood that the war could have been shortened by six months. It is a matter of record that two thirds of all of the Allied casualties in Europe were suffered after the September check.

Ideological Warriors

“The US Army by contrast put technical and administrative efficiency at the head of its lists of priorities, disregarded other considerations, and produced systems that possessed a strong inherent tendency to turn men into nervous wrecks. Perhaps more than any other factor, it was this system that was responsible for the weaknesses displayed by the US Army in WWII.”

Like Sherman, Patton saw no reason to assume large numbers of his had to be sacrificed simply because there were more of them than the Germans. Rather, if man for man they killed more effectively that the Germans, they could advance at a rapid clip that would require few casualties. In short Patton loathed Grant’s idea of the ‘terrible arithmetic’, which lay at the heart of the reasoning of Eisenhower and Bradley.

Patton, unlike any other Allied commander understood this war of ideas and spirit. Of American generals, he sensed best, as did Sherman, that democratic soldiers are not fond of the discipline of militarism. They do not naturally like distant and drawn-out campaigns; they are anti-aristocratic, and lack the same degree of blind devotion to a strong man that those defenders of autocratic society exhibit. If entrenched, they quickly tire of war; if they are kept on the defensive, they lose their spirit; if their commanders are to the rear, they feel the war itself is unfair; and if they are not reminded constantly of the moral stakes of the struggle, they seek simply to survive rather than to kill their enemy.

7. A Different Idea

We have seen that few moderns—so unlike the ancients—have acknowledged Epaminondas as the single greatest democratic general of the ancient world. We praise Pericles; but unlike the Theban, he fought by his own proud admission solely for imperialism, not democracy per se. In the same way as Pericles, not Epaminondas, has captured the popular imagination, so too Robert E. Lee—the “Apollo on horseback”—emerged from the Civil War as both a humanitarian and military genius. He was a good man who was neither. The coarser Sherman was a far better strategist, did far more to end the Civil War, killed fewer enemy and lost fewer of his own men--- and freed, rather than owned slaves. And like Epaminondas, he won, rather than lost the war.

In the end, Boeotians, Northerners, and American GIs advanced so rapidly and so lethally because they saw themselves as more moral troops than their enemies. As agents of long-overdue reckoning, they really did believe that they were democracy’s ultimate vengeance against a slave-holding society, that they were fighting a culture not merely an enemy army.

Patton Quote:

“Never take counsel of your fears” is answered by “Pursue the enemy with the utmost audacity”

EPILOGUE: The End of Democratic Marches?

In short never in human conflict have such a vast democratic infantry forces appeared out of nowhere, wrought such havoc, and then dispersed among the consensual culture that fielded them. These marches are not akin the invasions of history’s Great Captains. Alexander’s swath to the Indus River killed or displaced over a million people, the vast majority of them innocent civilians. His Macedonians were hired killers keen to loot a corrupt Persian kleptocracy, not give anyone freedom. Hannibal too was a mercenary commander of an imperial government who trekked across the Alps for glory and vengeance, not democracy, much less the genuine freedom of Rome’s subjects. Caesar crossed the Rubicon to destroy Republican government; his battle-hardened legionaries marched behind him out of personal loyalty to an autocrat and in hope of a rich retirement and free land. The Crusaders who traversed the Holy Land were not a militia and they did not seek freedom for others as much as forced subservience to their Christian god. Cortez burned his ships and marched inland to destroy a great empire with his bank of soldiers for hire, who had hopes of Mexican gold, vast estates, and knighthood at home. There was nothing democratic about Napoleon’s march on Moscow—and it led to disaster for both the emperor’s and the czar’s armies. The Germans who drove into Russia in June 1941 did so as fascists intent on destroying Stalinism, accompanied by SS, who murdered in the same spirit as the murdering commissars they sought to replace. The Russians in turn who went back from Moscow to Berlin did so as much to enslave Eastern Europe as to free Russia from the Nazis. Marlborough, Frederick the Great, and Wellington—great generals all—won magnificent victories, but their marching armies were not democratic; they fought largely for the supremacy of monarchy or the preservation of empire; and they freed no enslaved. Montgomery chased the Germans back across Africa, but it was a plodding march that could not reach the enemy heartland, and might close out a distant theater, not the war itself. MacArthur nearly drove the Communists out of the Korean peninsula, but he had no authority to go into China, and his United Nations army at its moment of victory was nearly routed. What Epaminondas, Sherman and Patton did as rare in military history, for democracy itself is rare in the larger history of civilization, and rare still its great armies of victory that seek no gold or land, but rather the enemy in its heartland only for the freedom of others.

Yet if history offers only three examples of democratic marches for freedom the record is at least clear. When a free and consensual society feels its existence threatened, when it has been attacked, when its citizenry at last understands an enemy at odds with the very morality of its culture, when a genius at war allows the army with freedom to do what he wishes, when it is to march to a set place in a set time, then free men can muster, that can fight back well, and they can make war brutally and lethally beyond the wildest nightmares of the brutal military culture they seek to destroy.

The antithesis is equally valid: democratic armies do not fight well when they are not attacked, when they are stationary with nowhere to march, when they fight to preserve privilege or empire, when they are not supported at home, when they are led by careful clerks and bureaucracies who command consensus—in short, when they are not moving forward with every means at their disposal to destroy the enemy in the cause of freedom. The entre American experience in Southeast Asia, like the Athenian disaster in Sicily, is proof enough of just how mediocre under those conditions—strategic, tactical, spiritual—a democracy at war can become

The cessation of the American Advance in the Gulf War and the negotiated armistice that followed were the greatest American military blunders since Viet Nam.

The great danger of the present age is that democracy may never again marshal the will to march against and ultimately destroy evil. In an era of television, the image of war’s brutality in our living rooms may stop the attack: the education system of the present, with its interest in self-esteem, sensitivity, and the therapeutic, may not turn out sufficiently idiosyncratic, audacious—and well-read—leaders; and instant communication may serve to bridle a mobile column at its moment of victory. But even a greater peril still in present-day democratic society is that we may simply have forgotten that there finally must be a choice between good and evil, that the real immorality is not the use of great force to inflict punishment, but as the Greeks remind us, the failure to exercise moral authority at all. When men like Epaminondas, Sherman and Patton got to war to stop evil and to save lives, there is a soul to their battle that lives on well on after they are gone.

This was a superb book, one that really made me think. It isn't necessarily perfect: I suppose that howls went up in military history circles (which don't include me), and there are one or two thing's I'd take issue with myself. None of this would surprise Hanson, he comments in one of his notes: "The rather unpopular view that ... is advanced in Hanson, Other Greeks ... ".

I have rarely read I book that left me feeling that I have learned more, and most importantly, prompted me to think so deeply about so many issues: responsibility, idealism, pragmatism, and the way that we judge people. More directly relating to Hanson's point: how and why do we make war? What should we intend to accomplish? For the several days that it took me to read this, my mind was racing. An Air Force pilot told me that his instructors said that if a conflict isn't worth total war, it's not worth waging. A statement that sounds brutal, but perhaps in the end avoids or shortens wars.

I was prompted to read this after reading Doctorow's The March. While I enjoyed that novel while I was reading it, I seems shallow and almost childish next to this. ( )

I couldn't figure out what point he was trying to make. ( )

Military leaders ( )