RIPPLES OF BATTLE by Victor Davis Hanson
Introduction
On my rare visits to the local cemetery, I am always struck by the unremarkable grave of Victor Hanson. The inscription is as spare as the stone itself—name, state, rank, dates of birth and death, and nothing much more except the nondescript “29 Marines / 6 Marine Div / World War II.” Unlike the other impressive tombstones of relatives in the family plot, there are no inscribed res gestae, not even a “loving father” much less a “beloved grandfather.” A man who dies tragically, young, and alone does so without capital, either monetary or human. When he leaves behind no progeny, it is evident in the modesty of his commemoration.
But then his mother died in childbirth, his father was blinded in the vineyard by a sulfur-machine accident. He was killed at twenty-three, without wife or children, his body eventually shipped back and reinterred in Kingsburg, California. And because Victor was an only child, when he died on Okinawa, his father Victor Hanson’s thin line perished as well. Had his memory vanished as well?
Certainly there are no Hansons left of Victor’s direct ancestry to appreciate the significance of his modest epitaph, whose calculus—death recorded on May 19, 1945, serving in the 29th Regiment, 2nd Battalion, Company F of the 6th Marine Division—reflected his presence at the nexus of one of the worst days of the bloodiest campaign in the Pacific theater, the final assault and capture of Sugar Loaf Hill and its environs. William Manchester, of the same regiment, wrote of the bloody assaults on Sugar Loaf:
Infantry couldn’t advance. Every weapon was tried: tanks, Long Toms, rockets, napalm, smoke, naval gunfire, aircraft. None of them worked. If anything, the enemy’s hold on the heights grew stronger. The Japanese artillery never seemed to let up, and every night Ushijima sent fresh troops up his side of the hill. We kept rushing them, moving like somnambulists, the weight of Sugar Loaf pressing down on us, harder and harder. And as we crawled forward, shamming death whenever a flare burst over us, we could almost feel the waves of darkness moving up behind us. In such situations a man has very little control over his destiny.
Victor was shot as his company beat back the last death-charges of suicidal Japanese to defend the hill, dying on Okinawa on the evening (May 18) before those who were left of his 29th Marines were finally relieved and evacuated from the battle. The official history of American operations on Okinawa reads, “A platoon of Company F also tried to advance along the ridge toward the west, but the leader was killed and the platoon withdrew under heavy mortar fire.” The authors then summarize the sacrifice, “On the next day, 19 May, the 4th Marines relieved the exhausted 29th Marines. During the 10-day period up to and including the capture of Sugar Loaf the 6th Marine Division had lost 2,662 killed or wounded; there were also 1,289 cases of combat fatigue. In the 22nd and 29th Marines three battalion commanders and eleven company commanders had been killed or wounded.”
In addition, the official history of the 6th Marine Division remarked of the exposed position of Company F on Sugar Loaf on the day of Victor’s death that “heavy fire continued to come from Horseshoe Hill and company F was dispatched in that direction. The assault was perfectly maneuvered; the Marines went right to the crest, where the fight developed into a grenade battle at close quarters with a terrific mortar barrage.”
To read accounts of those savage uphill assaults against entrenched Japanese is to wonder not why Victor was killed on May 18, but how in God’s name had he lived that long? After all, in just a few days, three thousand Marines were killed or gravely wounded in and around Sugar Loaf Hill, more Allied soldier casualties than lost on Monte Cassino and about the same number as on Tarawa. His 29th Regiment suffered 82 percent casualties on Okinawa and for all practical purposes had ceased to exist.
Yet without ostentatious stones, lasting works of fame, or any surviving immediate family, had the childless, young Victor Hanson really perished on that godforsaken hill with dozens of his friends on May 18? Surely not. Growing up, I heard his name nearly daily. My father was his first cousin, but the two were more like brothers, given their near-identical ages and lifelong companionship; for a time they lived side-by-side on adjoining farms, went to the same college, and joined the Marines. And so it was that the last half century our parents talked often about this mysterious dead man. “If only Vic had lived,” the refrain went, followed by all sorts of counterfactuals concerning the subsequent sad fate of his father, his high school and college prospects, whom he might have married, children reared, partnerships entered with my father, grandparents consoled, college work that presaged future success, farms saved—rather than people saddened, sickened, and cast adrift, and homesteads soon to be sold or lost. I began as a child almost to resent this shadowy moral exemplar, who had died without making a mistake, thus leaving his namesake with the burden of emulating such character.
My mother and father both offered these what-ifs, since all three of them had left farms in central California to attend the College of the Pacific together up in Stockton. “He was a wonderful man,” I would hear from her as a youth. After my mother’s death, Victor’s high school girlfriend, now widowed in her eighties, with great-grandchildren, often emerged from the past to keep up the refrain of praise and honor; she has now supervised the construction of a small memorial to the four fighting Hansons in the center of Kingsburg Memorial Park, once the site of their ancestral homestead. She visits still, and just a few weeks ago left me a formal handwritten note that ended:
Cpl. Hanson, only son and child of Victor Sr. and grandson of Nels and Cecilia Hanson, was killed in action on May 19, 1945—age 23 years and 3 months, along with another 12,500 valiant young men. The Kingsburg Recorder said of Victor Jr.—“He reflected the gentility emanating from his grandmother Cecilia (reared by her when he became a motherless infant). Those who knew him, all apprised him as a gentle man.” Victor Hanson, Jr. never returned to his home on 1965 18th Avenue, Kingsburg, California—Hanson Corner. He was awarded the Purple Heart posthumously.
From his surviving yellow letters on Marine stationery, I had already sensed just that humility, unusual even for the accepted modesty of that better age. And then recently I received a phone call from eighty-year-old Michael Senko, who occupied the foxhole where Victor died, and without warning had replied to my efforts in learning about Victor’s last moments. He too emphasized his “gentleness,” adding that he was a “perfect guy”—this remembrance from over a half century later. In a letter to his grandparents from basic training at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, after briefly and nonchalantly detailing all sorts of trial amphibious landings, marathon marches, and assorted tests of endurance, Victor was far more concerned with the health and safety of his octogenarian surrogate parents back home here in the 1940s small farming town of Kingsburg. The final paragraph reads: “I’m really glad to hear that you are all fine, because I wonder all the time if you are all O.K. I’m just fine, couldn’t be better and never weighed more. I guess I weigh over 200—not enough hard work I guess. Well I guess I better close for now. Hoping this letter finds you all well and fine, Love Victor.”
Occasionally a few sketchy details would emerge about his demise. “A damn machine gun got him from when he wasn’t looking,” my Swedish grandfather offered twenty years after Victor’s death, before coughing in midsentence and in anger—his own lungs had been ruined from gas in the Argonne. Other vague accounts mentioned his company being cut off and surrounded. Until this May I have often wondered how anyone knew of his last moments.
“They had no business putting those boys there on Okinawa in that way,” my dad also on occasion spit out at the end of one of his angry monologues. “They played right into Jap hands. Hell, we were bombing Japan to bits anyway, and they could have just passed that damn island by. But no, that was not the Marine idea of how to get things done.” What an odd thought: my generation who knew no battle had thought that we bombed too severely and unduly punished the Japanese; my father’s who fought the war was convinced that the air war was too late and not enough—and thus did not prevent the Japanese from punishing fellow Americans on places like Okinawa.
Both cousins had, in fact, joined the Marines; for an altercation with his officer my father was drummed out of basic training but not formally charged—the embarrassing details were never revealed to us—on the stipulation that he join the Army Air Corps, which eventually led him to something as equally horrific as Okinawa. Still, even armed with that disclosure I never quite understood why his anger was sometimes turned inward; surely it was not from a failure to fight on Okinawa side-by-side with Vic. At his other outbursts the remorse appeared even more bizarre, as he hinted that had the murderous B-29s—he had flown on thirty-nine missions from Tinian over Japan as a central fire-control gunner—firebombed Japan earlier and harder, Okinawa would have been irrelevant. In his logic, if a three-hundred-plane B-29 aerial armada had carpeted Japan in 1944 rather than in the spring and summer of 1945, Victor would perhaps have had garrison duty only, mopping up a few stalwart resisters on the charred island of Kyushu. Given the dreadful incendiary missions he had flown—only his crew and one other of the sixteen bombers in his original squadron survived—I, the solicitous and embarrassed college student in the mid-1970s, had once tried to offer solace. “Well, Dad, it’s hard to think you guys were slow; after all, you just about burned down the entire country in two months as it was.”
Most of my fellow university students at the time—to the degree they even knew or thought of World War II—in lockstep condemned the bombing, both conventional and atomic, as barbaric an act as Vietnam was then. My strange father, alone in the world, I gathered, felt that the horrific firestorms had been too little and too late! Such are the lifelong wages of rage when farm boys reluctantly leave their homesteads to kill those who have killed their own.
Victor’s Marine picture was—and still is—on our wall. Where his effects of a half century earlier went I don’t know. Only a few were apparently given to my late father. They usually turned up only by accident when I was a child. One day in 1962 in the barn I pulled out of the rafters a massive thirty-five-ounce Louisville Slugger with “Victor Hanson” burned into the wood; we used it for five years, put in screws, tape, and resin until at last it shattered with age and overuse. It was a massive bat, fitting seventeen years earlier for a young Swede of well over six feet three inches and 200 pounds.
When I went to UC Santa Cruz in the early 1970s, I took his college briefcase, then already thirty years old, with “VH” stamped in two places. Its age and queer construction on occasion brought offers of purchase from affluent would-be renegades from Los Angeles, who found its strange canvas and leather bindings, now stuffed with Greek and Latin books, either exotic or perhaps even organic. “His grandmother bought it for him,” my father explained, adding, “With his degree he was supposed to be an officer, not join the Marines at the front.” Even at eighteen I had been aware of the ludicrous contrast between the two Victor Hansons leaving the farm with that same satchel—one halfheartedly entering the indolent, self-absorbed culture of UC Santa Cruz, the other eagerly departing for the inferno of the United States Marine Corps of 1944.
Despite the daily reminder of the monogrammed briefcase, I tried to forget about Victor, but he nevertheless seemed to return on the most unlikely of occasions. Four years later at graduation, the pleasant parents of a Japanese friend from Okinawa ate with us at a postbaccalaureate dinner. I spotted my father sitting nearby and grimaced at what I knew would—had to—follow; this was, remember, Santa Cruz in 1975 (nearly thirty years to the month after Victor’s death). Our roommate’s mother made a perfectly sensible remark about the Americans and the hardships of her childhood growing up in wartime Japan; her husband from Okinawa also mentioned the war and the American bloodletting on the island.
In the smiling, laid-back atmosphere of a June graduation on Monterey Bay, everybody became more candid amid the white wine, the polite chatting, and the table talk. Could we not all agree about what the Americans had done? Comfortable in the university climate of rising diversity, attuned to what they saw as the new American enlightenment of shame and remorse over the recent bombing in Vietnam, someone let slip the B-29s, the firebombings, the suicides on Okinawa, and all those regrettable acts of American barbarity.
It was all downhill from there. I have tuned out everything of my beet-red father’s response to these gracious middle-aged Japanese except his last crude sentence: “It was not enough for what the Japanese did.” In their defense, who at such a place and at such a time—the students and their folk at Santa Cruz were not of the warrior class—could anticipate Victor’s ghost?
His letters to his grandparents mostly worried that he might not be good enough for the Marines, that should he fail various endurance tests, he might not make the cut for jungle fighting overseas, that through some imagined lapse of muscular strength—he was a highly sought-after scholarship college athlete who, with my father, played for Amos Alonzo Stagg at the College of the Pacific—he might not be a good enough Marine and so be replaced by someone more deserving, someone better. In one note to his grandparents, he expressed concern that the Marine-issue rifles might be insufficient for jungle warfare:
Could you be on the lookout for a .45 cal. Automatic Pistol? The model is 1911 or 1911A1. They don’t issue them to you any more but they are desirable to have besides a rifle in combat. They come in handy in case your rifle or carbine fails to fire. They look something like this [a sketch follows]—that’s a rough idea. If you happen to run across one and it is a good one we’ll buy it; you can use the money I sent you to put in the bank. I think you can get a new one from $45 to $60, but I don’t believe you’ll be able to find a new one. Let me know if you have any luck. . . . Today it is sure a beautiful day, nice and spring like. We still have cold mornings. Well I guess I better close for now. Love, Victor
I imagine that his two eighty-five-year-old immigrant grandparents immediately left their small Swedish farm to drive up to Fresno in search of a .45 pistol for their grandson so that he might kill, rather than be killed by, the Japanese. To no avail; whether they found one or not, I have no knowledge.
As I said, in the spring of 2002 I made efforts over six decades later to discover whether a single man from F Company was still alive—anyone who had either survived the hell of Okinawa or sixty years of life subsequent, or might have known Victor Hanson. For nearly sixty years, what was left of my family had known about Victor’s last hours apparently only from the official Marine letter of condolences. A first lieutenant, Robert J. Sherer, had written our family of Victor’s death on July 26, 1945: “Our Company had attacked and seized Crescent Ridge on the enemy held Naha-Shuri line on 18 May and we were digging in for the night when we began to receive heavy fire from an enemy machine-gun to our left. It was at this time that Corporal Hanson was wounded. He was given medical attention immediately, but lived only a short time. He was given a fitting burial. . . .”
What I soon discovered was quite startling. There were indeed survivors of Company F—and their recollections left me quite stunned. Richard Whitaker—a veteran of F Company, 2nd Battalion, 29th Marines who was wounded on Sugar Loaf Hill the night Victor was killed, and a prominent hero in George Feifer’s moving Tennozan: The Battle of Okinawa and the Atomic Bomb—helped me locate a few surviving members of Fox Company. Among them was none other than Robert J. Sherer!
After last writing the Hanson family fifty-seven years ago, now in his eighties he once more, on February 28, 2002, kindly sent me a second letter about Victor in the same elegant and dignified prose: “Victor Hanson, Jr. had been trained and was serving as a Fire Team Leader. He was a Corporal and was recognized as an outstanding Marine and leader. . . . I can recall seeing Corporal Hanson standing to hurl a grenade and being hit by fire from the enemy machine gun. My ‘Runner,’ PFC Ryan in the foxhole next to me was similarly hit by machine gun fire. Both died immediately, as did PFC Madigan. Sgt. Bill Twigger was wounded in the thigh and was ordered evacuated.”
Just a few days after the letter from Robert Sherer came the previously mentioned phone call from a 6th Marine Division veteran, Mike Senko, with a wealth of detail about Sugar Loaf and accounts as moving as Sherer’s. And then arrived the next day an unbelievably dignified narrative from none other than once-wounded Bill Twigger, who, like Robert Sherer, six decades later shed more particulars upon Victor’s death not before known to any in our family. “The news came down the line that Vic Hanson had caught an enemy machine-gun burst in his right thigh, and, before a corpsman could reach him to administer aid, he bled to death. The report was quickly confirmed that by reason of the shock of so massive a wound, Vic did not endure prolonged suffering, but died virtually instantly.”
And then Bill Twigger finished with a final, heartrending anecdote—which I think I can quote without embarrassment to the parties involved: “There is a tragic sequel to this event. Upon hearing of Victor’s death, young Peter Madigan lost his moorings, rose from his thus-far secure position and with loud shouting and cursing rushed into the open only to be cut down by rifle fire.” In explanation and recollection, Twigger wrote of Madigan’s near simultaneous death, “Trivia and vulgarity had no places in Victor’s vernacular. A hulk of a guy, the heftiest of us all, he was befriended by the ‘runt’ of the bunch, Peter Madigan.” Twigger elaborated on what a fine person Madigan had been, in moving language, like Sherer’s, that today’s graduate students could only hope to emulate.
But still this was not the end to this strange unfolding cycle of events. Finally, on March 31, 2002, on the eve of the fifty-seventh anniversary of the landing on Okinawa, I received an unexpected call from one Louis Ittmann, another veteran of Fox Company who had also learned of my inquiry. Yes, he too had known Victor Hanson quite well, and confirmed the picture of him—a massive, good-natured Swedish college graduate who bled to death from a machine gun burst on Sugar Loaf Hill. After an engaging conversation, Louis Ittmann finished by requesting something quite unexpected: would I, he asked, like Victor’s ring?
Ring?
Was this 1945 or 2002, I thought—and was I a comfortable forty-eight-year-old professor, or the old Swedish patriarch Nels Hanson, tottering out in his vineyard at eighty-one, stricken with the news of his lost grandson? Ittmann then explained. In a premonition of his death on Sugar Loaf Hill, Victor had earlier asked his friends to, in the event of his demise, remove his treasured ring and send it home. They had tried; but in attempting to deliver it to Kingsburg, California, out of courtesy they had first called our farm. The distraught family—my uncle, grandparents, and cousins—was too upset to come to the phone. Thus the good steward, Louis Ittmann, since that awful night fifty-seven years ago, had watched over Victor’s ring. On May 21, 2002, it arrived in the mail, its band cut, either from wear or the necessary efforts to remove it from the finger of Victor sometime after he was brought down from Sugar Loaf Hill. I am now holding it as I write this, and as a classicist I am mesmerized by the engraved silhouette of a Roman legionary. When did Victor buy it? And why was a Roman soldier on a ring of a farm boy in central California of the late 1930s and 1940s?
Since my parents are dead and the rest of most other Hansons as well, those and other questions I suppose will remain unanswered. But I do know that I have never communicated with more gracious men than those 6th Marine Division veterans of that awful night on May 18 on Okinawa—Whitaker, Sherer, Senko, Twigger, Ittmann, and a few others—who kindly and freely shared their remembrances with me by letter and phone some fifty-seven years later. There was no bitterness evident in their prose and in their voices against the questionable strategy of sending them all head-on against the entrenched and veteran crack troops just weeks before the war’s end; nor any lasting hatred mentioned of the Japanese; nor apologies for their tough combat; nor anything but moving appreciation expressed for this present country, especially in this current trial of our own.
When I asked whether there could have been another way to win Okinawa, one sighed and said, “Maybe—but Okinawa was an island of thousands of enemy soldiers in our way to Japan, and we couldn’t just leave that many of them behind us. We were at war.” When I pressed further whether the tactics of head-on charges against entrenched troops made sense, the general consensus was, “Who knows? But that was the Marine way and we accepted it. It was our job to take the island, and we did it.” Despite the horror of what they went through, there seemed a Virgilian sense of pride in their sacrifice: Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit [Perhaps there shall come a day when it will be sweet to remember even these things].
Given the large number of American dead on Okinawa, I do not believe that the good and experienced men who planned the storming of Okinawa—Operation Iceberg—in the luxury suites of the San Francisco St. Francis Hotel were all that wise in the manner of their war making. Neither do I give all that much credence to the United States Army’s official narrative of the campaign, which concluded with the confident excuse, “The military value of Okinawa exceeded all hope.” I acknowledge that both traditional and revisionist historians have only scorn for those like me who question the need for or the logic of Iceberg—and I can offer no alternative to the strategy of taking the island that might have ensured fewer dead on either side. Surely I do not know how the Americans could have gone ahead with plans to invade Japan with the knowledge that they either could not or would not eliminate first a veteran army of 110,000 Japanese on Okinawa at their rear. And I also know that others more illustrious died on Okinawa—Ernie Pyle, Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner himself, and several Medal of Honor winners. And I grant that the death of a twenty-three-year-old farm boy I never met from Kingsburg, California, pales besides two hundred thousand combined Japanese soldiers and Okinawan civilians incinerated, blown apart, and slowly starved to death that summer. Yes, I accept all that, but I also know of the wide ripples of one man’s death, and as I look at his ring they have not ended—at least not quite yet.
“Great battles,” Winston Churchill remarked, “change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, in armies and in nations.” They do, and we Americans, individually and collectively alike, have not yet seen all the “new moods and values” created “in nations” by September 11, 2001. The longer-term ripples of that attack are still washing up—long after the first tidal waves of horror that swept over us in the days following the crashing of airliners into the symbols of American economic and military power.
We know that there are three thousand dead. A trillion dollars in capital has been lost; $100 billion in property damage was incurred; and millions of Americans were put out of work. The government itself was transformed—citizens worldwide were delayed and disrupted by increased security measures. Access to public facilities is now restricted. Private nagging fear and doubt about future attacks remain. We will not grasp for years the full interplay of events set in motion by the sudden vaporization of thousands in the late summer of 2001. The orphans and children of orphans not yet born will not—cannot—forget September 11 because they are now part of it forever.
The victims of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the crashing airliners did not fall in pitched battle. They were not even armed. None were expecting their fate. Yet they were nonetheless combat casualties of self-described warriors—indeed, the first terrible fatalities of what may prove to be a long war. And because battle by its very nature radically changes history in ways that even other seminal events—elections, revolutions, inventions, assassinations, and plagues—cannot, it will require decades before historians can chart all the aftershocks that followed September 11.
Churchill’s “great battles” often dispel the easy assumptions of peacetime, as democracies, once attacked, are aroused from their somnolence to deadly and unpredictable fury. Before the carnage at Shiloh, Ulysses S. Grant forecast that the Civil War would be ended by “one great battle.” Afterward—with more casualties on April 6–8, 1862, than in all of America’s wars up to that time—generals realized that in a novel fight with rifled muskets and canister shot, a great number of young men on both sides would have to die before the South would accept Union primacy. A previously labeled “crazy” Sherman would use his sudden Shiloh fame and the new realities of total war to think the once unthinkable—and in a few months lead thousands on the March to the Sea.
Just as Grant and his generals woke up from Shiloh on April 8 to a new world, so did Americans on September 12. In a blink the old idea of easy retaliation by using cruise missiles or saber-rattling press conferences seems to have vanished. With the end of that mirage, the two-decade fear of losing a single life to protect freedom and innocent civilians also disappeared. Past ideas of restraint, once thought to be mature and sober, were now in an instant revealed more to be reckless in their na?veté and derelict by their disastrous consequences. In the years to come we may well see far more nightmarish things in our military arsenal than bunker-busters and daisy-cutters. Americans once feared to retaliate against random bombings; terrorists now wonder when we will stop—as the logic of September 11 methodically advances to its ultimate conclusion. Aroused democracies reply murderously to enemy assaults in a manner absolutely inconceivable to their na?ve attackers.
At peace and in affluence, many Americans look back in revulsion at Hiroshima, but hardly any of these moral censors were mature enough in 1945 to remember Okinawa. They can hardly appreciate what suicidal fanaticism in April, May, and June of that year had taught past generations: over 12,000 American dead, 35,000 more wounded, and over 300 ships damaged. In fact, 35 percent of all American combatants who fought in and around Okinawa were casualties. The Japanese lost 100,000 killed and another 100,000 civilian casualties—much of it in hand-to-hand fighting on this large island, but an island minuscule in comparison with the far better defended and as yet unconquered Japanese mainland.
Far more often than a suicidal attack on people at work, battle consists of a few hours of reciprocal and organized killing in which thousands of soldiers collide to decide the fate of thousands more to the rear. In the melee, heroism, bravery, or even superior technology cannot guarantee survival. Combatants often perish due to accident and simple bad luck, with consequences that become apparent often only decades later. Battle also is not merely a logical continuance of politics, but an abnormal event in which thousands of warriors—most often in the past, young male adults—are freed to kill each other for a few hours, a dramatic and strange experience bound to change their lives and the fate of their families and friends for centuries thereafter.
Battles are deliberate and entirely human-inspired. Not being accidental occurrences, they can be even more calamitous to the human psyche than the occasional greater carnage caused by natural disasters or human catastrophes—such as mine explosions or raging fires and floods that fall as acts of God upon the entire civilian population. It is said that divorce can be worse for children than the demise of a parent; so too the battle dead are harder to take for their surviving kin than fatalities from the highway or plague. You see men, not gods, are deliberately responsible for the dead of battle, in the conscious effort to slay other humans and not through mere carelessness or errors in judgment. In time we can come to accept the deaths of loved ones if they fall into chasms or die of infection—less so when we know that their youthful bodies were torn apart by angry humans without help from nature.
People forgive the ravages of water and flame, but less so Japanese, American, or German slayers. Battle—again so unlike nature—brings with it bothersome and nagging ideas of preventability, culpability, causation, and responsibility married to the lingering notions of what-if?, whose fault?, and he, not it, did this. Anger, passion, and revenge always erupt from battle. “Remember the Alamo,” “. . . the Maine,” or “. . . Pearl Harbor” inflames nations in a way that the far greater losses from polio, Hurricane Carla, or the Anchorage earthquake cannot. We do not bury even heroic lifeguards or smoke jumpers in Arlington National Cemetery or put them atop bronze horses. Hundreds of firemen perish each decade, but rarely instantaneously and in great number trying to rescue thousands of their kin while under attack by a foreign enemy.
The social sparks that fly from battle ignite entire societies and soon become the flames of history. Herodotus reminds us that in war, fathers bury sons rather than sons fathers. Euripides insists that wives and mothers, like those of his Trojan Women who grieve and suffer over their lost ones, have it worse than soldiers themselves. Historians remind us that our own Civil War was a “rich man’s war, and a poor man’s fight.” The forces of opposition to American segregation that had remained dormant in peace were awakened by World War II—as the nonwhite fought well for a country they loved but that did not accord them full political equality.
Battles, then, rip open the scabs of wounds of generational rivalry, the age-old competition between the sexes, class struggle, and racial strife. Already Americans ask, “How could aliens so easily enter the United States and under what auspices?”—as the government in response moves radically to reassess the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Meanwhile, the once reactionary idea of profiling suspects by age, gender, religion, and ethnicity should have disappeared—but apparently not altogether when the 19 murderers of 3,000 innocents were uniformly young, male, Islamic, from the Arab world, and living stealthily in the United States.
Battle is the raucous transformer of history because it also accelerates in a matter of minutes the usually longer play of chance, skill, and fate. Mistakes become fatal in seconds rather than remaining irrelevant lapses of day-to-day existence. Deaths are not the singular and often anticipated events among families, but occur en masse, wholly unexpected, and often horrifically. Education, training, and aristocratic pretension may become meaningless in combat. Many of those with the top-dog views at the World Trade Center were doomed; janitors and clerks on the bottom floor lobbies had a better chance of flight. A destitute homeless person found safety on the sidewalk five blocks away by his very failure and subsequent distance from society’s sophisticated and visible machinery, while a Harvard MBA, distinguished record of hard work and rare discipline, ensured that a stockbroker was in the line of fire as an easy target who had the grand views of Floor 93.
So battle is a great leveler of human aspiration when it most surely should not be. Stray bullets kill brave men and miss cowards. They tear open great doctors-to-be and yet merely nick soldiers who have a criminal past, pulverizing flesh when there is nothing to be gained and passing harmlessly by when the fate of whole nations is at stake. And that confusion, inexplicability, and deadliness have a tendency to rob us of the talented, inflate the mediocre, and ruin or improve the survivors—but always at least making young men who survive not forget what they have been through.
Usually, military historians examine decisive battle in either a strategic or tactical context—the role of Lepanto or Hastings in deciding the larger pulse of wars, which end, renew, or are unaffected by a single day’s butchery. Just as commonly, scholars see battle more as the science of how to destroy thousands through maneuver and technology. Books abound on Hannibal’s encirclement at Cannae, the stealth of Arminius, Rommel’s use of Panzers, or LeMay’s devilish brew over Tokyo. But rarely do we appreciate battles as human phenomena or the cumulative effects—the ripples—that change communities for years, or centuries even, well after the day’s killing is over. And to do that we must reexamine some well-known battles of the past in different ways, and measure others that heretofore have not warranted much attention on the grounds of their tactical irrelevance, bad timing, or absence of suitable witnesses and recorders.
Great men are cut down in battle who could have saved thousands of other lives; families ruined for centuries due to a single bullet. And by the same token, the supposedly mediocre emerge from battle, with the acclaim and opportunity to match their innate (and previously unknown and untapped) talent. Plays, poems, and novels are written because of a day’s fighting, art commissioned, philosophy born. Whole schools of thought are created or deemed flawed by a battle.
In this regard I plead guilty to the classical notion—more or less continuous from Herodotus and Thucydides to the close of the nineteenth century—of the primacy of military history. In theory, of course, all events have equal historical importance—the creation of a women’s school in nineteenth-century America, the introduction of the stirrup, the domestication of the chicken, or the introduction of the necktie. And such social or cultural developments, whether they are dramatic or piecemeal, do on occasion change the lives of millions.
Yet in reality, all actions are still not so equal. We perhaps need to recall the more traditional definitions of the craft of history—a formal record of past events that are notable or worthy of remembrance. Whereas I Love Lucy might have transformed the way thousands of Americans in the 1950s and 1960s saw suburban life, women’s roles, or Cubans, it still did not alter the United States in the manner of a Yorktown, Gettysburg, or Tet—in creating, preserving, or almost losing an entire society. It was an event of the past, but not necessarily either notable or worthy of remembrance or commemoration.
Nor are all battles themselves equal. Ostensibly, the greater the number of participants, the more critical the tactical, strategic, and political stakes at play—and the more blood on the butcher’s bill, the more likely is the engagement to make history. From what we know more than a century after the fact, Gettysburg—whether we look at Lee’s climactic failure to topple the North, the heroism on Little Roundtop, the sheer number of dead and wounded, or Lincoln’s address—was more momentous than Pea Ridge fought in March 1862 to ensure that Missouri would remain in the Northern camp. All remember Salamis, where Western civilization was saved in its eleventh hour from Xerxes; few recall Artemisium weeks earlier, where storms and Greek courage helped hold off for a time the invading Persian fleet.
Scholars argue over the so-called “great battles” as historians and compilers continue to publish such lists—in no clear agreement whether Antietam or Vicksburg, Normandy Beach or the Bulge, Stalingrad or Kursk were the real seminal events. Yet my purpose here is not to enter that fray other than to discuss its existence in the epilogue. Rather, I wish to show that while all battles are not equivalent in their effects upon civilization, they do share at least this common truth: there will be some fundamental and important consequences beyond other more normal occurrences, given the unnatural idea of men trying to kill each other in a few hours in a relatively confined space. Battles really are the wildfires of history, out of which the survivors float like embers and then land to burn far beyond the original conflagration. To teach us those important lessons we must go back through the past to see precisely how such calamities affected now lost worlds—and yet still influence us today.
In that regard, I have selected across time and space three less well-known battles of spears, black powder, and modern guns to show how our lives even today have been changed in ways we do not readily appreciate—and by a few hours long ago that few recall. Most of us know something of Marathon, but almost nothing of the obscure battle of Delium in 424 B.C. Gettysburg is part of the American heritage, less so Shiloh a year earlier. Books and films herald Normandy Beach; almost none commemorate the far greater losses on Okinawa—a savage event less well known than Iwo Jima, where far fewer were killed.
These battles in themselves are tragic—not always inherently evil, yet much less very often good. Instead, moral appraisals of battle rest with the nature of the combatants, the causes for which men kill and die, and the manner in which they conduct themselves on the battlefield. Yet battles at least alter history for centuries in a way other events cannot. And we should remember that lesson both when we go to war and try to make sense of the peace that follows.