Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (62 page)

1
I have used the terms “Mexicas” and “Aztecs” (from the Nahuatl “Aztlan”) interchangeably, although Montezuma and his subjects probably called themselves “Mexicas.” The use of “Aztecs” came into common use by European chroniclers after the seventeenth century. Most of Cortés’s Spanish soldiers were Castilians, and so I employ both words to describe his conquistadors.

EPILOGUE

Western Warfare— Past and Future

For every state war is always incessant and lifelong against every other state. . . . For what most men call “peace,” this is really only a name—in truth, all states by their very nature are always engaged in an informal war against all other states.

—PLATO,
Laws
(1.626A)

THE HELLENIC LEGACY

FROM THE FIGHTING of early Greece to the wars of the entire twentieth century, there is a certain continuity of European military practice. As the chapter epigraphs suggest, this heritage of the Western war is not found in its entirety elsewhere, nor does it begin earlier than the Greeks. There is no Egyptian idea of personal freedom in the ranks; no Persian conception of civic militarism or civilian audit of the Great King’s army; no Thracian embrace of the scientific tradition; no disciplined files of shock phalangites in Phoenicia; and no landed infantry of small property owners in ancient Scythia—and thus no military in the ancient Mediterranean like the Greeks at Thermopylae, Salamis, or Plataea.

This 2,500-year tradition explains not only why Western forces have overcome great odds to defeat their adversaries but also their uncanny ability to project power well beyond the shores of Europe and America. Numbers, location, food, health, weather, religion—the usual factors that govern the success or failure of wars—have ultimately done little to impede Western armies, whose larger culture has allowed them to trump man and nature alike. Even the tactical brilliance of a Hannibal has been to no avail.

That is not to say that throughout three millennia all Western forces have shared an exact blueprint in their approach to war making through periods of upheaval, tyranny, and decay. Phalangites are a long way from GIs, and the victory at Tenochtitlán is distant from Salamis. Nor should we forget that the non-West has also fielded deadly armies, such as the Mongols, Ottomans, and communist Vietnamese, that have defeated all opposition in Asia for centuries and kept Europe at bay. But the military affinities in Western war making across time and space from the Greeks to the present are uncanny, enduring, and too often ignored—which suggests that historians of the present age have not appreciated the classical legacy that is at the core of Western military energy throughout the ages. There is a sense of déjà vu as these chapters unfold, an eerie feeling that phalangites, legionaries, mailed foot soldiers, conquistadors, redcoats, GIs, and marines all shared certain recurring core ideas about how to wage and win wars.

In battles against the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the New World, tribal and imperial alike, there is a shared legacy over centuries that allowed Europeans and Americans to win in a consistent and deadly manner—or to be defeated on rare occasions only when the enemy embraced their own military organization, borrowed their weapons, or trapped them far from home. Notice that nowhere in these case studies were Western victories a product of innately superior intelligence, Christian morality, or any notion of religious or genetic exceptionalism. While Persians, Carthaginians, Muslims, Aztecs, Ottomans, Zulus, and Japanese all battled in a wide variety of ways, they do share two affinities throughout the ages: none fought exactly as Westerners—or across the oceans as well. Xerxes, Darius III, Abd ar-Rahman, Montezuma, Ali Pasha, and Cetshwayo all envisioned war as a theocratic, tribal, or dynastic crusade, in which speed, deception, numbers, or courage might negate the discipline of Western infantry or the technology and capital of Europe. Montezuma could not envision fighting in the Mediterranean, just as Ali Pasha would never see the Americas.

In just the few episodes we have examined, the similarities are clear. Greek sailors in 480 B.C., in the way that they created and manned their fleet, discussed and voted on strategy before battle, and chose and audited their leadership, were far more similar to Venetians at Lepanto two millennia later than they were to the sultan’s men, who by law were slaves like Xerxes’ seamen at Salamis. By the same token, the rows and files of Alexander’s small army of expeditionary phalangites were in spirit replicated at Cannae, as well as Rorke’s Drift and the other battles of the Zulu War. Outnumbered British redcoats fired on orders, sought to form rank, and charged on command and in unison. The close-ordered ranks and files of the phalanx, whether of Macedonian pikemen or British shooters, are not known outside of the European experience. The manner in which Rome reconstituted its armies after the defeat at Cannae was not all that unlike the American restoration after Pearl Harbor in the months before Midway. Both cultures in the aftermath of defeat drew on common republican traditions of drafting their free voting citizenry into nations-in-arms.

It is a general rule that the Macedonian phalanx, like the army of Hernán Cortés, the Christian fleet at Lepanto, and the British company at Rorke’s Drift, fought with weaponry far superior to that of their adversaries. There was little chance that the Aztecs, for all their rich local natural resources, on their own accord could make harquebuses, gunpowder, or crossbows, the Ottomans topflight bronze cannon, and the Zulus Martini-Henry rifles—and little doubt that a harquebus was deadlier than a javelin, a Venetian 5,000-pound cannon more lethal than its Ottoman clone, and a .45-caliber slug far superior to an assegai. Japan learned to its advantage in the nineteenth century that Europe alone could design battleships—and that battleships were superior to anything that floated in the Sea of Japan. The North Vietnamese did not fight with the tribal spears of their past.

Western military power, however, is more than superior technology. Just as the peace movement and the constant political audit of the military in Vietnam conditioned the behavior of American armies in Southeast Asia, so Bishop Colenso and his family published critiques against the British invasion of Zululand. Bernardino de Sahagún’s narrative of the Spanish conquest of Mexico sought to criticize the morality of his countrymen’s army—in a way unthinkable in Aztec, Vietnamese, or Zulu society. It is no accident that Themistocles, like both the victorious Cortés and Lord Chelmsford, did not die a hero in a homeland grateful to him for the slaughter of its enemies. Did such dissent weaken consistently Westerners’ ability to wage war? Not always, at least not in the long term. The tradition of Western critique and audit has not only established European credibility and so served to ensure that the written and published story of war was largely Western; it has also shown that minds outside the battlefield ultimately had a say in how their nation’s treasure and manhood were spent, sometimes saving the military from itself.

OTHER BATTLES?

The battles of this study are offered as representative examples of general traits rather than absolute laws of military. They are episodes that reflect recurring themes, not chapters in a comprehensive history of Western warfare. That being said, however, I am not certain that the conclusions would have been very different if we had examined other randomly chosen encounters from roughly the same periods and places with similar outcomes—say, Plataea (479 B.C.), Granicus (334 B.C.), Trasimene (217 B.C.), Covadonga (718), the conquest of Peru (1532–39), the siege of Malta (1565), Coral Sea (1942), and Inchon (1950). In nearly all those engagements the same paradigms of freedom, decisive shock battle, civic militarism, technology, capitalism, individualism, and civilian audit and open dissent loom large. In the flesh it is a long way from Greek fire to napalm, from ostracism to impeachment, but in the abstract, not so distant after all.

Even a random catalog of exclusively abject Western defeats— Thermopylae (480 B.C.), Carrhae (A.D. 53), Adrianople (A.D. 378), Manzikert (1071), Constantinople (1453), Adwa (1896), Pearl Harbor (1941), and Dien Bien Phu (1953–54)—would not lead to radically different conclusions. In most of these cases, vastly outnumbered Western armies (Romans under Crassus, Byzantines under Romanos, Italians in Ethiopia, French in Vietnam) were unwisely deployed or poorly prepared—and again far outside of Europe. Even these catastrophes did not always endanger in their immediate aftermaths Greece, Rome, Italy, America, or France. Defeats that had more lasting historical impact— Adrianople, Constantinople, or Dien Bien Phu—came at the borders of European territory and near the end of collapsing regimes or empires. And the victorious Other had either Western-inspired arms or Western-trained consultants among the ranks.

The Western military heritage, itself a dividend of a much larger and peculiar cultural foundation, did not determine in some preordained fashion the outcome of every encounter between West and non-West. Rorke’s Drift, but for Chard, Bromhead, and Dalton, could have easily been lost. Salamis, Lepanto, and Midway also involved brilliance in tactical command. Wars are fought by men who are fickle and in real conditions that are wholly unpredictable—heat, ice, and rain, in tropical and near arctic conditions, close and far from home. Western armies in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, as soldiers everywhere, were often annihilated— often led by fools and placed in the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time. But their armies, for the cultural reasons this book has outlined, fought with a much greater margin of error than did their adversaries.

Themistocles, Alexander the Great, Cortés, and the British and American officers of the last two centuries enjoyed innate advantages that over the long duration could offset the terrible effects of imbecilic generalship, flawed tactics, strained supply lines, difficult terrain, and inferior numbers—or a simple “bad day.” These advantages were immediate and entirely cultural, and they were not the product of the genes, germs, or geography of a distant past. The Zulu empire was doomed to be conquered once the British decided to invade its borders, regardless of its victory at Isandhlwana, despite the tactical lapses of Lord Chelmsford, and irrespective of courageous
impis.

In examining many of these worst-case scenarios of the Western approach to war making, such as Cannae or Tet, the resilience and lethality of the West seems even more remarkable. If the tradition of dissent can survive Vietnam, then its place in Western military practice will remain unquestioned. If Western infantry was prevalent during the so-called Dark Ages of the mounted knight, then its intrinsic advantages at Poitiers seem even more evident both earlier and later. Mustering legions of free citizens at Cannae, only to lose to a mercenary army of Hannibal, requires careful consideration of the entire value of civic militarism. The war against the Zulus, Africa’s most disciplined and organized army, is an unlikely but valuable lesson in understanding the unmatched worth of Western order, rank, and file.

THE SINGULARITY OF WESTERN MILITARY CULTURE

Discussion of Western military prowess demands a precision in nomenclature often lacking in most accounts of the history of warfare. Political freedom—an idea found nowhere outside the West—is
not
a universal characteristic of humankind. Western elections and constitutions are not the same as tribal freedom, in which much land and few people occasionally give individuals opportunity to find solitude and independence. The desire to fight as freemen is also different from the simple élan of defenders who expel tyrants and foreign powers from their homeland. Persians, Aztecs, Zulus, and North Vietnamese all wished to be free of foreign troops on their native soil, but they fought for the autonomy of their culture—not as free voting citizens with rights protected by written and ratified constitutions. A Zulu could roam relatively free on the plains of southern Africa, enjoying a somewhat more “free” lifestyle than a British redcoat in a stuffy barracks; but the Zulu, not the Englishman, was subject to execution by a nod of his king. Shaka proved this tens of thousands of times over. North Vietnamese communists duplicitously promised to their troops a Western-style “democratic republic”—not an Asian dynasty, communist police state, or feudal society—the reward for conducting a nationalist war against foreign intruders.

All armies engage in mass confrontations at times; few prefer to do so in horrendous collisions of shock and eschew fighting at a distance or through stealth when there is at least the opportunity for decisive battle. Likewise, armies from the Persians to the Ottomans often developed sophisticated methods of mustering troops; none outside the West drafted fighters with the implicit understanding that their military service was part and parcel of their status as free citizens who were to determine when, how, and why they were to go to war. Foot soldiers are common in every culture, but infantrymen, fighting en masse, who take and hold ground and fight face-to-face, are a uniquely Western specialty—the product of a long tradition of a middling landholding citizenry who expresses unease with both landless peasants and mounted aristocrats.

The ability to use a weapon, even to improve its effectiveness with practice, is not comparable to inventing and fabricating arms in mass quantities. Africans and American Indians could employ European rifles, become crack shots, and occasionally repair broken stocks and barrels. Yet they could not produce guns in any great number, if at all, much less craft improved models or find in a written literature the abstract principles of ballistics and munitions to conduct advanced research.

Buying and selling is a human trait, but the abstract protection of private property, the institutionalization of interest and investment, and the understanding of markets are not. Capitalism is more than the sale of goods, more than the existence of money, and more than the presence of the bazaar. Rather, it is a peculiar Western practice that acknowledges the self-interest of man and channels that greed to the production of vast amounts of goods and services through free markets and institutionalized guarantees of personal profit, free exchange, deposited capital, and private property.

Warriors are not necessarily soldiers. Both types of killers can be brave, but disciplined troops value the group over the single hero and can be taught to march in order, to stab, thrust, or shoot en masse and on command, and to advance and retreat in unison—something impossible for the bravest of Aztecs, Zulus, or Persians. Every army possesses men of daring, but few encourage initiative throughout the ranks, and welcome rather than fear innovation, so apprehensive are they that an army of independent-thinking soldiers in war just might prove the same as citizens in peace. Bickering among soldiers and disagreement among a small cadre of generals—whether Hitler’s captains or Aztec lords—are universal traits of armed forces. But the institutionalization of critique in the military— soldiers’ subservience to political leaders, existence of law courts, uniform codes of discipline subject to review, appeal, and ratification—is unknown outside the West. The freedom among citizens to criticize wars and warriors openly and profligately has no pedigree outside the European tradition.