Customer Reviews

From the Jaws of Victory

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This is one of those books that changed my perception of the world. As a student during the Vietnam War, I shared with others the certainty that war was wrong, but I struggled to understand why, exactly, war is such a failed enterprise. I read many books on war, trying to understand the dynamics of this universal human behavior. Slowly, I learned about war. But this book, in a single shattering paragraph, nailed it for me. I quote that entire paragraph here. It comes at the end of a chapter about Charles XII of Sweden fighting Peter the Great of Russia in the Great Northern War around 1708. Charles XII was brilliant, honorable, courageous, and generous. Peter was an unprincipled autocrat. They met at Poltava, and Peter was victorious. His victory was certainly not due to any great military talent; in a later battle against the Turks, Peter spent the night before the battle running through the Russian camp screaming "We're all going to die!" -- not the height of generalship. In any event, here's the long concluding paragraph:

"Charles, on the other hand, was too competent, too much a Wunderkind. Without him his commanders were simply what they were -- dull or mediocre or reasonably skilled professionals who could never on their own have undertaken a tenth of what they did in his company, and doubtless would not have dreamed of trying. A man of obvious ability and depth who might, under other conditions, have become a mathematician or a philosopher -- though possibly never a statesman -- Charles was driven to specialize too soon. Of all the men he might have been, circumstances quickly forced him to choose one; and the hopelessness of the military problem he was called upon to solve, together with his early success at solving it, may then have made the choice irrevocable. He was (or perhaps became) medieval in that war was his obsession. Like Edward III he had little time, and possibly no liking , for administrative matters, leaving those to his slow-moving elderly ministers in Stockholm and showing few signs in his long, busy career that he understood the world which was growing around him -- one in which numbers, wealth and strategic position were to be everything and questions of honor and dynastic polity utterly forgotten. Not many others of his day understood it either, but one may suppose that Peter did. Of the two he was far the more modern -- a psychically disheveled realist given to brutal excesses and totally expedient in his use of power, but nonetheless a man who saw through to the issues that really concerned his country. In contrast to Charles', the tsar's acts and preoccupations were of far greater scope, most of them converging on a common aim and a surprising number of them yielding substantial results. Just as he shaved his prelates' beards, discouraged traditional forms of dress as impractical, and defied the xenophobia of his people by openly favoring foreigners and their handiwork, so, for all his absurdity as a commander, he achieved in the field what he had set out to. One may find him too rapaciously 'natural', too 'sincere' in the naked animal fashion which we are trying in this century to accept as the right and necessary way for men to be; one may even object that in the interests of his beloved Russia, he killed too many of his beloved Russians. He still fell short of bad generalship in one essential -- he did not kill people for absolutely nothing. In the end, Charles did."

I still choke up reading that final paragraph. War is sometimes necessary, and we must pay a price with our dearest blood when we fight, but if we are to pay this horrible price, it must be to accomplish something worth the price -- which is rarely the case.

Savage, funny, and brilliant, this book dissects military blunders through the ages. While it's written with a definite agenda - the architects of our Vietnam policy should be cringing every time someone starts reading - it's still immensely enjoyable and informative.

And yes, George McClellan pretty much gets his own chapter.

This is a very interesting compilation of defeats in the face of certain victory. It is a good read for war history fans.