The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (9 page)

Unlike the case of many postwar memoirs, the accuracy of Sledge’s facts has never been called into question. He does not magnify his own achievements or those of his own Company K. Sledge sometimes uses a few footnotes of explication; often they are heartbreaking asterisks that apprise the reader that the wonderful officer Sledge has just described in the text was later shot or blown up on Peleliu or Okinawa. He reminds his readers that his Marines, being as human as any other soldiers, were capable of great cruelty—“a passionate hatred for the Japanese burned through all Marines I knew.” But that being said, Sledge’s own moral censure reveals a certain American exceptionalism that such barbarism should be, and usually was, condemned as deviance rather than accepted as the norm—quite different from the Japanese:

In disbelief I stared at the face as I realized that the Japanese had cut off the dead Marine’s penis and stuffed it into his mouth. My emotions solidified into rage and a hatred for the Japanese beyond anything I ever had experienced. From that moment on I never felt the least pity or compassion for them no matter what the circumstances. My comrades would field strip their packs and pockets for souvenirs and take gold teeth, but I never saw a Marine commit the kind of barbaric mutilation the Japanese committed if they had access to our dead.

What I find most haunting about
With the Old Breed
is Sledge’s empathy with those whom he might not have been expected to share a natural affinity, among them even at times the enemy—whom he often wishes not to kill gratuitously and whose corpses he refuses to desecrate. His is a very mannered Southern world where the martial chivalry of Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas shine through; implicit is a pride in the stereotyped manhood of the Old South, but also love for his Yankee comrades, who, he knows, fight as well as his kinsmen. Sledge admits fear, occasionally acknowledging that his courage was only the result of desperation or rational calculation. He only incidentally notes his skill as a Marine. Yet through his own matter-of-fact descriptions the reader easily surmises why his comrades nicknamed a man of 135 pounds “Sledgehammer.”

Sledge’s heroes amid the desolation of the charred islands—Sergeants Baily and Hanney, Lieutenant “Hillbilly” Jones, and the beloved Captain Haldane—are singled out for their reticence, reflection, and humanity. Of Jones, Sledge writes, “He had that rare ability to be friendly yet familiar with enlisted men. He possessed a unique combination of those qualities of bravery, leadership, ability, integrity, dignity, straightforwardness, and compassion. The only other officer I knew who was his equal in all these qualities was Captain Haldane.”

While the reader is astonished at the élan and skill of Sledge’s young compatriots, Sledge nevertheless describes them as apprentices in the shadows of the real “old-time” Marines—a near mythical generation that came of age between the wars and was made of even sterner stuff, fighting and winning the initial battles of the Pacific at Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester on New Britain against the supposedly invincible and ascendant Japanese of 1942 and 1943. Of Gunnery Sergeant Elmo Haney, who scrubbed his genitals with a bristle brush and cleaned his M1 and bayonet three times daily, Sledge concludes, “Despite his personal idiosyncrasies, Haney inspired us youngsters in Company K. He provided us with a direct link to the ‘Old Corps.’ To us he was the old breed. We admired him—and we loved him.”

Indeed, in Sledge’s Pacific, there are Homeric heroes of all sorts of an age now long gone. Bob Hope, at the height of his Hollywood career, turns up as the devoted patriot at out-of-the-way Pavuvu, flying in at some danger to entertain the troops. And the future Illinois senator Paul Douglas—noted author and University of Chicago economics professor—appears in the worst of combat at Peleliu as a gray-haired, bespectacled fifty-three-year-old Marine enlistee, handing out ammo to the young Sledge. Douglas later becomes severely wounded at Okinawa and receives the Silver Star and Purple Heart. Again, if modern readers are amazed at the courageous breed of young Marines who surround Sledge, he advises us that we are even more removed than we think from these earlier Americans, since the real “old breed” antedated and was even superior to his own.

Sledge shares a hatred for the brutality of the Japanese, but it never blinds him to their shared horrible fate of being joined together in death at awful places such as Peleliu and Okinawa. So he is furious when he sees a fellow Marine yanking the gold teeth out of a mortally wounded but very much alive, Japanese soldier on Okinawa: “It was uncivilized, as is all war, and was carried out with the particular savagery that characterized the struggle between the Marines and the Japanese. It wasn’t simply souvenir hunting or looting the enemy dead; it was more like Indian warriors taking scalps. Such was the incredible cruelty that decent men could commit when reduced to a brutish existence in their fight for survival amid the violent death, terror, tension, fatigue, and filth that was the infantryman’s war.”

Indeed at the heart of Sledge’s genius of recollection is precisely his gift to step aside to condemn the insanity of war, to deplore its bloodletting, without denying that there is often a reason for it, and that a deep love results among those who share its burdens.

War is brutish, inglorious, and a terrible waster. Combat leaves an inedible mark on those who are forced to endure it. The only redeeming factors were my comrades’ incredible bravery and their devotion to each other. Marine Corps training taught us to kill efficiently and to try to survive. But it also taught us loyalty to each other—and love. That esprit de corps sustained us.

There is a renewed timeliness to Sledge’s memoir.
With the Old Breed
has never been more relevant than after September 11—war being the domain of an unchanging human nature and thus subject to predictable lessons that transcend time and space. It is not just that American Marines of the new millennium also face a novel strain of suicide bombers, or fanatic enemies emboldened by a frightening anti-Western creed, or once again the similar terror of Sledge’s mines, mortars, and hand-to-hand battle in places like Iraqi’s Haditha or Ramadi.

Rather, Sledge reminds us of the lethality of what we might call the normal American adolescent in uniform, a grim determination that we also recognized in the Hindu Kush and Kirkuk. Raised amid bounty and freedom, the American soldier seems a poor candidate to learn ex nihilo the craft of killing. How can a suburban teenager suddenly be asked to face and defeat the likes of zealots, whether on Okinawa’s Shuri Line or at Fallujah in the Sunni Triangle? “Would I do my duty or be a coward?” Sledge wonders on his initial voyage to the Pacific. “Could I kill?”

But read
With the Old Breed
to be reminded how a certain American reluctance to kill and the accompanying unease with militarism have the odd effect of magnifying courage, as free men prove capable of almost any sacrifice to preserve their liberty. Or as E. B. Sledge once more reminds us thirty-six years after surviving Okinawa:

In writing I am fulfilling an obligation I have long felt to my comrades in the 1st Marine Division, all of whom suffered so much for our country. None came out unscathed. Many gave their lives, many their health, and some their sanity. All who survived will long remember the horror they would rather forget. But they suffered and they did their duty so a sheltered homeland can enjoy the peace that was purchased at such high cost. We owe those Marines a profound debt of gratitude.

We owe the same to the late E. B. Sledge. He reminds us in a “sheltered homeland” that America is never immune from the “insanity” of war. So he brings alive again the names, faces, and thoughts of those who left us at Okinawa and Peleliu, but who passed on to us what we must in turn bequeath to others to follow.

CHAPTER 6

The War to Begin All Wars

Athens Meets Sparta
*

O
NE REASON WHY
E. B. Sledge’s magnificent memoir,
With the Old Breed
, did not immediately win a large audience following its initial publication in 1981 was perhaps the public’s weariness, if not disgust, with American military action in southeast Asia, especially tales of infantry brutality. But in general, military history has not been very popular after the controversial Vietnam War. In a larger sense, the unease may be because war itself, under any circumstances, is felt to have little utility in a postmodern world.

When it comes to our martial past, we especially of the present academic culture tend to cast moral aspersions on history’s Cro-Magnons: those benighted combatants who, unlike ourselves, resorted to war out of stupidity, greed, exploitation, vanity, or a quest for power. And more often, we in the university simply do not want to read about war at all. Thus in the most recent
Oxford Classical Dictionary
(third edition, 1996)—the classicist’s invaluable guide to the people, places, and ideas of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds—the entry for “Peloponnesian War” earns a pitiful twenty-one lines, far fewer than for “Gynaecology” at eighty-one lines, “Magic” at 122, “Homosexuality” at 337, or “Literary Theory” at 435. In that authoritative dictionary’s single short paragraph about the war, we read that the twenty-seven-year-long conflict, which wrecked fifth-century Athens and altered the course of the Greek city-states, “was recorded by the great historian Thucydides
and that is the most interesting thing about it
” (emphasis added).

So without Thucydides’
Peloponnesian War
, was the real Peloponnesian War—the fact, the event, what we might call the non-text version—just an uninteresting few thousand dead here and there, an unimportant democracy wrecked, and a minor renaissance ended? Forget that a quarter of the population of Athens (including Pericles) died within four years from a mysterious plague; forget that entire cities, including Potidaea, Mytilene, Plataea, Scione, and Melos, were either brutally conquered or simply razed; forget that almost forty thousand Athenians and their allies perished on Sicily; or that dramatic masterpieces—
Trojan Women
,
Oedipus Rex
,
Acharnians
, and others—grew out of the ordeal. Put all that to one side, because now “the most interesting thing” about that great conflict was the fact that Thucydides
wrote
about it.

Thucydides was brilliant, of course—perhaps the greatest mind the ancient world produced, given his ability to translate confused and often absurd events of his time into abstract laws of human behavior, as he put it, “for all time.” His history did not merely chronicle the war but also analyzed it as a vehicle to explain to us the unchanging nature of man and our tenuous grip on civilized life.

Nevertheless, the Peloponnesian War—the actual battle, not the book—
is
the seminal historical event of the Greek city-state. It transcended even the genius who wrote about it and the lesser chroniclers such as Xenophon, Plutarch, and Diodorus who rounded out the story. (Thucydides’ unfinished account breaks off amid the events of 411
B.C.
) Facts really do exist without texts.

We have heard a lot about Thucydides in the new century, both explicitly and through vague, indirect references to his supposed thought and message. In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, Americans at war worried about the outbreak of plague in their cities. Newspaper columnists warned that sending troops abroad to Afghanistan or Iraq was tantamount to dispatching them to perish like the Athenian armada in Sicily. Newscasters admonished us not to bully neutrals as if they were poor Melians. In turn, defenders of the war argued that the United States was a democratic, open society—an Athens fighting for its life against those who preferred hierarchies and various castes of subservience. Neither side could agree whether America was an ascendant civilization or one at the brink of an Athenian-like collapse, so exhausted and demoralized by a culture of excess that it no longer believed in or could defend itself. Nevertheless, most agreed that the so-called war on terror was “new” and could drag on for “decades.”

The Peloponnesian War, then, is not really so ancient. Even if some classicists think that Athens’s war with Sparta was relatively uninteresting, outsiders still write books with titles like
War and Democracy: A Comparative Study of the Korean War and the Peloponnesian War
and
Hegemonic Rivalry: From Thucydides to the Nuclear Age
. The conflict continues to be evoked in the present—its supposed lessons both astutely and clumsily applied to most of our own wars of the last century.

Russia—or was it really Hitler’s Germany?—purportedly was like oligarchic Sparta in its efforts to destroy a democratic, seafaring America. Did not the Cold War, after all, similarly divide the world into two armed camps, with former allies who had united against a common enemy only a half century later facing off in decades of hostilities? Modern observers still recall that Victorian and maritime England (read: imperial Athens) went to war twice against the great land armies of autocratic Germany with its Prussian warrior code (read: modern Sparta). Do democracies—with their moral laxity and messiness—ultimately lose fights against more authoritarian states? Or was Thucydides right in concluding that democracies are more resilient and imaginative than other governments at war? Was the Sicilian expedition a lesson for the Boer War, Gallipoli, Vietnam, or any proposed great democratic crusade abroad?

Why is this ancient war between tiny Athens and a smaller Sparta still so often used as a historical primer and yet misused? First, it was long—twenty-seven years—and it lined up the entire Greek world into opposite armed camps. Second, the two antagonists were antithetical in nearly every respect, and thus the bipolar fighting was proclaimed to be a final arbiter of their respective values—political and cultural values that still divide us today. Third, it started in Greece’s great golden age, and its attendant calamity was felt to have ended for good that period of great promise. Fourth, players in the war were the greats of Hellenic civilization—Socrates, Pericles, Euripides, Alcibiades, Sophocles, Aristophanes, and others—and their lives and work reflect that seminal experience. Fifth, Athens lost, casting into doubt ever since not merely the power but also the morality of democracy, especially when it executed Socrates in the war’s aftermath. Sixth—and at last we arrive at the theme of the
Oxford Classical Dictionary
’s brief entry on the war—Greece’s preeminent historian, Thucydides, was not merely an analytical and systematic writer of a great extant history; he was also a brilliant philosopher who tried to lend to the events of the war a value that transcended his own time, making his history of ideas “a possession for all time” that could furnish lessons for men at war in any age. Thucydides’ man of the ages is a pretty savage creature whose known murderous proclivities are kept in check—albeit just barely—by an often tenuous and hard-to-maintain veneer of civilization.

“A great war and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it,” Thucydides wrote, contending at the outset of his history that the struggle between the two opposing city-states would be cataclysmic because both belligerents were at the height of their powers and were eager to draw the rest of the Greek world into the equivalent of an ancient Hellenic World War. “The greatest disturbance in history,” he soberly added of the conflict that consumed his own adult life. Even 2,500 years later we tend to agree that it sabotaged much of what Greece could have accomplished.

“It is,” the classicist Donald Kagan concludes in his newly condensed history of the war,

both legitimate and instructive to think of what we call the Peloponnesian War as “the great war between Athens and Sparta,” as one scholar designated it, because, like the European war of 1914–18 to which the title “the Great War” was applied by an earlier generation that knew only one, it was a tragic event, a great turning point in history, the end of an era of progress, prosperity, confidence, and hope, and the beginning of a darker time.

Most wars, of course, do not end like they start. Before Shiloh (April 6–8, 1862), for example, Grant thought one great battle would win the Civil War. After the battle, he realized that years, thousands of lives, and millions of dollars in capital were needed to ruin rather than defeat a recalcitrant Confederacy. So too the Spartans marched into Attica in spring 431
B.C.
, thinking that a year or two of old-style ravaging of fields would bring them victory; seven years later neither side was closer to victory, and they still had another twenty far-worse seasons to go.

If the earlier united victory over the Persian king Xerxes (480–479
B.C.
) marked the inauguration of the triumphant golden age, this classical century that started with such great promise finally crashed with the self-inflicted wreckage of the city-states. Thousands of free Greeks who had once united to fight Persians now killed one another and aided Persians. The carnage that Darius and Xerxes once could only hope for at Marathon and Salamis, Greeks like Pericles, Cleon, Alcibiades, Brasidas, Gylippus, and Lysander a half century later brought about, killing more of their own people in a year than the Persians had in a decade.

Thucydides felt strongly that Spartans had invaded the Athenian countryside in spring 431 because “they feared the growth of the power of the Athenians, seeing most of Hellas already subject to them.” Of course, there were various other, more immediate pretexts for war: Athens had imposed economic sanctions against Megara, a Spartan ally; both sides sought to draw the neutral island of Corcyra into their respective alliances; they each quarreled over the loyalty of the key northern city of Potidaea; the Boeotians wished to eliminate the outpost city of Plataea, which brought fear of Athenian imperialism to their doorstep. And so on.

But Thucydides stuck to his thesis about the “clash of civilizations,” believing that the larger underlying differences between the two powers—perhaps not always perceptible to Athenians and Spartans themselves—ensured that the more immediate and minor disagreements would eventually lead to a cataclysm. After all, if Sparta ignored the pretexts of Corinthian and Megarian grievances, the sheer dynamism of Pericles’ imperial culture—majestic buildings, drama, comedy, intellectual fervor, an immense fleet, radical democratic government, an expanding population, and a growing overseas empire—would eventually spread throughout the Peloponnese and offer incentives to Sparta’s friends that she could not hope to match. Who could win a war of attrition against the world’s first America—especially when you could offer only massive iron ingots as money, a ramshackle hovel as a national capital, and a Gestapo-like storm corps in lieu of an army of liberation?

Still, scholars argue over Thucydides’ glum appraisal that war was inevitable and overrode what individual Spartan and Athenian leaders might do or not do in any given crisis. Yet few now—in part thanks to the work of Professor Donald Kagan—question his keen appraisal that states can war over ideas, perceptions, fears, and honor as well as particular material grievances. Sparta’s fault in breaking the peace of 431 was not so much that it was culpable in any given context, but rather that it was all too human—and thus prone to all the wild emotions that sometimes make men do what is not in either their own or the general interest. In the post-Marxist era, we still find it hard to believe men will fight for reasons other than exploitation, colonialism, or to take someone else’s money or land.

The Peloponnesian War itself proved to be a colossal paradox. Sparta had the most feared infantry in the Greek world. Yet it was Sparta’s newly created navy that finally won the great battles of the war. Democratic Athens sent almost forty thousand allied soldiers to their deaths trying to capture far-off Syracuse, the largest democracy in the Greek world—even as thousands more of her enemies were soon to plunder her property with impunity less than twenty miles outside her walls from the base at Decelea. Alcibiades at times proved the savior of Athens, Sparta, and Persia—and their collective spoiler as well. Athens started the war off with gold piled high in its majestic Parthenon; it ended the conflict broke and unable even to flute the final columns of the Propylae, the monumental gateway to the still-unfinished temples on the acropolis. Sparta fielded the most terrifying army in Greece, and yet most of its opponents fell not in pitched battle but rather either to disease, at sea, or in guerrilla-style killing.

Pericles planned the war and reminded his countrymen of what was required to see them through, but he did not even survive the conflict’s third year—a victim of a plague that he helped to induce by ordering all of Athens’s rural population to evacuate inside the crowded city’s walls. The philosopher Socrates had doubts about democratic Athens’s hubris and megalomania, but not enough reluctance to prevent him from fighting heroically in her cause in his potbellied middle age. Thucydides used the broad message of the war’s senselessness to explore his bleak views about human nature, but no Athenian fought more unquestioningly and without cynicism in service to his country.

No ancient war—not Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, Alexander the Great’s grandiose invasions, or Hannibal’s romp into Italy—is more contradictory than the three decades of intramural fighting between Athens and Sparta: a land power versus a maritime power; the Dorian starkness contrasted with Ionian liberality; oligarchy pitted against democracy; ostentatious wealth set against practiced dearth; a majestic imperial city dethroned by a rural hamlet; and a humane imperialism that killed the innocent even as a garrison state championed the cause of state autonomy abroad. No wonder classicists tend to avoid the whole and focus on its bits and pieces—treaties, generals, decrees, finances, rhetoric, and the like. It is all too big and confusing, and so by our experts better relegated to a standard reference work in a single paragraph of twenty-one lines.