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The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny

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The Soul of Battle compares three "campaigns", for lack of a better word, that in the author's mind have very similar characteristics. While the timing of this book (it was written in 1999 and published initially in 2001) and the epilogue indicate that this book was written to either critique the limited war aims of the first Gulf War or to urge - in a rather abstract way - the liberation of the Iraqi people, it is a fantastic read that will long outlast the current war in Iraq. Mr. Hanson is viewed by many as an apologist for the Neo-cons, but that does not detract from his ability to create an interesting thesis, write a compelling narrative, and imply multiple levels of interpretation. In short, this type of book is exactly what a classics or liberal arts education is supposed to be about.

This book does a great service by introducing Epaminondas to the modern reader. It seems a safe assumption that most moderately well educated Americans knew nothing about this man until Mr. Hanson published this book. It also seems a reasonable assumption that Boeotian democracy has further lessons for the modern Americans.

One of the interesting characteristics of all three "liberators" shared is the fact that, to a large extant, they waged war not only on the army of the enemy, but also his culture or soul. One of the not so subtle points in Mr. Hanson's writings is that not all cultures are equal or morally equivalent. Therefore, it is necessary from time to time to beat back the evil that men do by destroying the culture and support infrastructure that makes such evil thrive. However, Mr. Hanson seems to argue that evil can be completely vanquished. The ancient Greeks would say that evil is part of human nature and must be dealt with as necessary. They would agree that one way to do so - perhaps the most effective, albeit horrifying, terrible, and costly way - is war.

Another interesting fact is that people who are liberated did not, in statistically significant way, participate in the fighting that liberated them. To be sure, the Union raised hundreds of thousands of black troops, Epaminondas left behind former Helots trained in war with walled cities, and there were many partisan groups in France, Germany, and Poland. The latter country also had Jewish partisan groups that had fought from the first day of war until they were eventually disarmed by Soviet forces. Yet the fact remains that none of these forces could have liberated themselves or been more than a nuisance on their own. Therefore, these three conflicts are fundamentally different from revolutions where an outside entity intervened.

Mr. Hanson is a bit unfair, perhaps, in his critique of Gen Eisenhower and Gen Bradley. While Gen Patton was probably right that the Battle of the Bulge could have been exploited better, it is just as likely that well trained and disciplined German troops could have opened their lines and let Patton's striking force go past and then close the lines to block his fuel and ammo support. This is something they did time and time again to Russian forces on the Eastern Front as the German forces declined in mobility and firepower. Indeed, this is often the only effective tactic left to forces that either lost or never had the mobility required for modern warfare.

In the end, this book is typical of Mr. Hanson's other works: Highly readable, interesting thesis, and based on a solid grounding of history and traditional intellectual discourse. This book is highly effective and worth reading.

The Soul of Battle is a brilliant work crafted by a master of both ancient and contemporary sources in Military History. Shunning the relativistic analyses expounded by many recent military historians, Victor Davis Hanson offers instead three historical armies of liberation, each of whose commanders and soldiers fought for real moral imperatives. By comparing Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton to other giants of military strategy--Alexander of Macedon, Napoleon, and Hitler--Hanson accurately exposes the real difference between the former generals, who believed that armies could be vehicles of liberation, and the latter rulers who used armies as tools to subjugate, not free. Readers conversant with classical works will especially appreciate Hanson's exclusive use of primary source literature in his treatment of Epaminondas. The reforms of this Theban general, famous for his innovations of novel phalanx tactics--later borrowed by Philip and Alexander of Macedon--are supported by an abundance of ancient source materials. Anyone familiar with Hans Delbrück's Warfare In Antiquity will be delighted by Hanson's readable prose and illustrative accounts of how the Theban general altered the way Greek columns operated on the classical battlefield. We also learn that just after Napoleon made himself emperor through his effective, but costly, direct approach, Sherman, who eluded politics, utilized the indirect approach, saving the lives of his men by "cutting a swath" through southern slave-holding territories. Under Sherman's command most unionist soldiers aspired both to reunite the nation, and to give slaves a real share in the American constitutional ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Many of the French soldiers of the levee en mass also fought for democratic principles. However, the French had a very different leader. Napoleon, as Michelet has written, was "pitiless to the common people," and it was the men of France, not their Corsican leader, who were the "true heroes of the Revolution." Napoleon's "children" were sadly mistaken in the notion that their "Petît General" had a real faith in the same ideals that drove them forward. Napoleon understood well that the effectiveness of moral principles to create an esprit de corps among his soldiers did not depend on his own humanitarian ideals. Indeed it was a young George S. Patton Jr., who recognized the value of ideology in creating the victorious French armies. In his "The Secret of Victory," a study on Marbot and other writers of the Napoleonic Wars, Patton wrote that the French soldiers had often been moved by intense emotional inspiration. It was the very faith in abstract principles such as, La Patrie, Liberté, Le Peuple Souveraine, and La Gloire that had been among the prime motives of their greatest feats of arms. Patton, as Hanson rightly points out, hoped to engender such passionate morale in his own armies. But Patton, unlike Napoleon, believed in the values with which he inspired his men: armies could and did exist to save lives. And when lives were at stake, quick action was always better than hesitation, courage always better than fear. In addition, Hanson's comparison of Alexander to Hitler could not be more precise. Both leaders intentionally allowed atrocities throughout the duration of their campaigns in order to subjugate the "uncivilized" peoples to their East. Alexander's pan-Hellenistic cause was little different than Hitler's pan-Germanism; his policy was the same. Rape, plunder, murder and the razing of cities was the order of the day. As Arrian recounts, festivals of Bacchian glee followed each Macedonian victory where soldiers were encouraged to drink away their guilt and revel at the expense of the eastern peoples they had brutalized and robbed. It is dead wrong to assume that dressing up like a Persian at such debauched costume parties was the same as "attempting to merge Greek and Persian customs through example." If Alexander had not burned Old Thebes, Tyre, Gaza, and Persepolis-- repositories of nearly all the knowledge and high culture of the Eastern world--such a "blending of cultures" might have been possible. Alexander's actions prove his intent. Battle is always bloody, nearly always catches up the innocent in its violence, and is often little more than a tool utilized to solve disputes over foreign policy among nations. At their worst wars promote the selfish and inhumane policies of autocratic leaders such as Alexander, Napoleon and Hitler. But Epaminondas, Sherman and Patton serve as paradigms to remind us that the act of battle can also have a soul or deeper purpose more profound than the more common and insidious reasons for which it is most often employed. As surely as wars can be waged as a means to enslave, they can, have been, and must be fought to free any who are oppressed victims of inhumane policies. And it was exactly because Soul's three generals fought for such moral imperatives, infusing the spirit of their armies with their own principled ideals, while additionally evading the temptation to become caught up in the games of high politics, that each was hated by his own leaders. These three great men of history nevertheless overcame jealousy, as well as internal politics, in order to further the cause of freedom. The point is exactly that democratic armies DO NOT always produce men of such moral calibre--they are few and far between. Hanson's perceptive arguments, then, finally disabuse us of the common misconception that men everywhere, and at all times, fight only to save their own skins and those of the men in their individual units--an uncompounded answer to a complicated question now passé, and discredited. Instead, ideology counts, and those with the higher moral imperatives can, through perseverance, win in the end. This work belongs in every serious military historian's library. Geoffrey Parker's comment that, "Hanson is fast emerging as our foremost living military historian," stands repeating. Like Thucydides' Peloponnesian War, Soul of Battle truly is a "history for all time", and like Hanson's Western Way of War this work will rank among the great classics of military history.

I found Dr. Hanson's latest book interesting, informative and controversial. In "The Soul of Battle" he describes the campaigns of three generals and the very successful armies they led, which - he asserts - were ideological armies driven by moral imperatives rather than loyalty to friends in the same unit. This is a revolutionary claim - at least to this reviewer - who has been fed for the last 3 or 4 decades on the theory that morale in any army was a product of the interpersonal loyalties of a few close comrades.

I don't know that I completely believe the arguments in the "The Soul of Battle," but the book is so provocative that I am going to have to wait a while and then read it several more times to figure out what I really believe. In the meantime, the book provided me with new insights into the short period of Thebean hegemony in Classical Greece between 370 and 360 BC, the daring success and real goals of Sherman's march to the sea during the American Civil War, and the outstanding accomplishments of the United States Third Army under General Patton in France in the second half of 1944.

Hanson uses the exploits of three historical military leaders -- Epaminondas of Thebes, who led 70,000 hoplites through Sparta and the Peloppenese; Union General William T. Sherman, who marched his Army of the West through the heart of an unrepentant South; and George Patton, who drove his army into Germany following the Allied invasion of Europe -- to illustrate the importance of an ideal in motivating "democratic" armies to defeat corrupt or morally bankrupt societies. The message is an important one and the historical analysis provided is first-rate, as is that demonstrated in Mr. Hanson's other works.

The problem is that the same message is repeated ad nauseam. Each of the three sections -- particularly that on Epaminondas -- could have been half the length to convey the same message. Mr. Hanson literally repeats the same message over and over and over -- for example, how Epaminondas motivated his hoplite host, the evil inherent in the Spartan helot system, the effect of the success against the Spartiates that gave Epaminondas the momentum to invade the Pelopponese and humiliate the knights of Sparta before their women, etc. He uses the same relatively sparse quotations over and over again, or uses redundant sources to convey the same message -- like quoting from the letters of ten privates in Sherman's army to make a point rather than just using one or two. The endless repetition tests the patience of the reader -- I actually skipped several pages from the concluding chapter in the section on Epaminondas when I realized that I was reading yet another rehash of the same points made several times before.

The lack of a firm editing hand is exacerbated by Mr. Hanson's continual use of hyperbole in describing and emphasizing the "genius" of the profiled generals. If the point being made is valid and the evidence supports the theme, there is no need for such literary crutches. If he would have simply given the reader the facts and allowed the conclusion to be drawn inexorably from the text, the message would have been delivered far more forcefully.

It is also curious that Mr. Hanson did not more fully describe the tactical innovations that went hand in glove with the strategic decisions that brought these generals such success. The first section on Epaminondas describes only briefly the innovation of putting the finest hoplites against the Spartan right and increasing the depth of the phalanx to 50 shields, rather than the typical 8-10, which provided far more thrusting power and allowed the Thebans to penetrate the Spartan line and send the Spartan allies fleeing. Although the theme of the book may have been the importance of the democratic ideology motivating the armies and the generals leading them, the practical reality is that no amount of ideology can succeed without effective tactics. Given Mr. Hanson's immense familiarity with the minutiae of hoplite warfare, I was disappointed that more attention was not given to this issue.

I was also disappointed in Mr. Hanson's dismissal of other military leaders as corrupt or otherwise not deserving of praise or recognition because their motives were not as pure as the three generals featured. Although Epaminondas did accomplish an amazing feat, to consider him the greatest general of the classical age is simply unsupportable. What of Scipio Africanus, who vanquished Hannibal, never lost a battle and saved Rome? Or Alexander the Great, who -- whatever his motivations -- conquered more territory in five years than any other leader in history, and could very well have brought all of Europe, the Middle East and North Africa under his dominion had he not died at age 33? It is one thing to distinguish the moral imperatives that drove these men, and quite another to simply dismiss those that, at least in Mr. Hanson's mind, did not fight for the right reasons.

In sum, like this review, the book could have been much shorter, more concise, more sparing in the use of hyperbole, and more inclusive of the technical and tactical innovations that freed these impressive and influential leaders to execute the strategies that made them famous. I do recommend the book, but believe the material could have been more strongly and effectively wielded by others, such as B.H. Liddell Hart or John Keegan.

The reviews seem to focus a lot on the democracy of the governments fielding the respective armies. Certainly in a democratic society, the soldiers will have freedom of speech and private property or the hope of private property. To microcosm that down a little, I deduced the generals being examined lead their armies from the front; they were the most visible to the enemy and they also made sure their troops were cared for. Indicative of this, Patton made the health of his troops' feet a career-enhancing or career-ending criterion for his unit commanders. All of a sudden the troops got clean socks with their dinner.
I applied the principles I learned here to my job as an account manager for an IT firm. While my first efforts to implement bold leadership were definitely uneven, the lessons for anyone who dares to lead for a common good are to be taken to heart. Dr. Hanson's style here is captivating, accessible and engaging.

Growing up in the South, Dr. Hanson's assessment of the cowardice of the slave-holding society was a huge revelation to me.
I read this probably three years ago. I have to say it is one of the most formative and challenging books I have read in my life.

Victor Davis Hanson's previous books have revealed him to be an iconoclast. Soul of Battle attacks many received notions about ancient Greece and American history. One common idea that flits about in the highest offices of the land and in the groves of academe takes a real hit in this book. That idea is that sweet reasonableness is an adequate substitute for military force. The Athenian intellectuals could not bring down the Spartans; the high-minded abolitionists didn't end slavery; and windy talk about the 'four freedoms' didn't rid the world of the Nazis.

I am not sufficiently familiar with the history of ancient Greece to comment on Hanson's treatment of Epaminondas. I have however been inspired by reading Soul of Battle to read Xenophon's Hellenica to get a contemporary view of the invasion of Laconia. On the other hand, I am very familiar with the other two periods treated in the book: the March to the Sea and the American drive across France into Germany. I have read almost all of the same sources as Hanson and in the main have come to the same conclusions. However much Southerns may lie to themselves and others, the Civil War was really about slavery and Sherman is hated to this day in the South because he brought that iniquitous society to an abrupt end. A former slave who was interviewed during the Civil War Centenial described watching Sherman's troops marching past her plantation: "They were the most beautiful men in the world," she said. That could stand as a fitting epigraph for this book.

This book, written in 1999, is a must read for anyone wanting to evaluate America's chances in the current conflict.

Soul of Battle is about a special intersection of ideology and warfare. Hanson proposes that democratic "armies of a season", led by philosopher-generals, in pursuit of a just cause, can be phenomenally devastating beyond what any material measures would predict, when taken on an anabasis (march upcountry) into the heart of an oppressive, militaristic society.

To illustrate this thesis, Hanson captivatingly narrates the details of the marches and men lead by three generals: Epaminondas, William Sherman, and George Patton. The first lead the yeomen of Thebes to crush the supposedly unstoppable Spartans in their homeland. The second lead his famous-and often misunderstood-"March to the Sea" that eviscerated the Confederacy and ended their will to fight. The third, despite constant interference from above, lead the brand-new Third Army in a mad dash into the heart of Nazi Europe. All three were vilified by members of their own side, worshipped by the men they commanded, and unexpectedly victorious over and devastating to the slave-owning regimes they went up against.

The first thing that grabs me, reading this book, is how compelling Hanson's narratives are. Some of the minutiae he examines would, in the hands of another author, make for somewhat dry reading. Hanson, though, has the refined gift of not only loving his subject matter to death, but also of being able to convey that love to a fairly broad audience.

Hanson is a professor of Greek at California State University in Fresno, as well as a frequent contributor of opinion articles to outlets like National Review. However, he is also a fifth generation farmer and a great believer in the "yeoman-citizen" who puts down his work to go and fight evil for a season, much as his father did in World War Two. This perspective comes out strongly in his sympathies for the Theban hoplites, the midwestern soldiers of Sherman's Army of the West, and the unassuming Americans of Patton's Third Army.

The book is enjoyable, but is Hanson's thesis true? It's certainly compelling as he argues it. Much of what he says flies in the face of the accepted wisdom regarding why soldiers fight. Citing letters and diaries of soldiers, though, he does show that ideology and idealism were significant motivating factors for these people-these folks fought to do more than merely "protect their buddies". He also takes on the accepted wisdom regarding the generals that have partially overshadowed Sherman and Patton (Grant and Eisenhower, respectively). Comparing Sherman to Grant (who were friends), he notes that Grant's efforts were focused on the "terrible arithmetic" of grinding down the lives of the Army of N. Virginia, while Sherman fought a largely battle-free campaign to destroy the Confederacy's will to fight. Eisenhower was a logistical genius and part of the new breed of "corporate generals", a mastermind of management and organization; Patton, on the other hand, was the general who saw that the conservative approach directed by Eisenhower was unnecessarily long and-while "safer" from the strategic perspective-ultimately far more costly to the individual lives, not only of allied soldiers, but also to enemy soldiers and civilians held in helotage or worse.

Let me back up a moment. Before opening this book, I would always have characterized myself as a fan of Alexander the Great, Robert E. Lee, and Douglas McArthur. Sherman has never interested me, Patton always bored me, and of Epaminondas I knew nothing. Hanson has fully converted me in all regards, now.

This is a good book, but there are many good books. It makes it onto my Warblogger's Bookshelf because it is also of real relevance to today's conflict. The most disturbing aspect of this book is the trend over history that the three generals exhibit: as command and control has become more all-encompassing and farther reaching, as armies have continued to reward good "peacetime generals" and politicians have gained greater influence over the day-to-day decisions of the military, the potential effectiveness of these rare and critical philosopher-generals has steadily decreased over time. The kind of person you want leading your democratic army when confronting real evil is generally someone that will be rejected by polite society; they are at their best when they may act on their own. Had Bush and Powell, the first time around, not halted Schwarzkopf's Iraqi anabasis before it was completed, we would be looking at a very different Middle East, right now. At the same time, as Hanson himself has said in many places, a democratic society's auditing of the military that serves it is an important foundation of the free society we enjoy and defend.

Hanson's thesis is multipart and, in the end, complex; sometimes it feels like he is trying to cover too much at one go, dashing about to keep all of his plates spinning. This is a small criticism, though, as he does manage to pull it all off in what amounts to a wonderfully written book filled with compelling stories, all supporting an important statement on the nature of war.

Mr. Hanson has created an interesting book, comparing the battles, motivations and organization of three great leaders Epaminandous, Sherman and Patton. He again studies the character of the societies they came from and how this is reflected in the armies and in the way the leaders handled the battles. I found the section on Patton especially interesting, especially his thesis that Eisenhower and BRadley (especially the latter) were at times incompetent. I am sure this is not old news, but the arguments made were quite convincing.

Another argument that is interesting and not completely drawn out is that society had possibly changed around battle preventing Patton from executing his war plan to his best ability. The idea Patton expounded of killing as many of the enemy as possible with as few American casualties as possible seems to have been somewhat politically incorrect. The advent of better communications also meant the leader had less freedom of action. It would be interesting to read more on this thesis.

Finally, one small flaw that bothers me, Mr. Hanson can get a bit repetitive. For example he dwells on General Patton's lack of supplies so often and uses almost the same sentences all the time. It is like he feels we forgot what he said a few pages before.

Victor Davis Hanson's "The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day, How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny" is a thought-provoking, interesting, but too-lengthy study of three great democratic military leaders: the Theban Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton. Hanson argues that the democratic armies under these three leaders, engaged in noble fights to save the oppressed and end tyranny, used their moral soul to defeat enemies that most considered superior.

Hanson devotes one section to each of the leaders, giving brief biographies as well as highlighting their major campaign: Epaminondas' successful campaign to free the Spartan helots; Sherman's march through Georgia; and Patton's breakout from the Normandy beachhead. Hanson eschews traditional narrative history and tells the stories of these campaigns in a random order, sometimes starting at the end and working backwards, hopping around at other times, and never leaving any doubt or suspense about the conclusion. The book reads more like a discussion of the subject than actual history.

Hanson harps on his thesis that, by fighting to free the helot slaves in Sparta, black slaves in the American South, and Jews and many other minorities being exterminated in the Greater Reich, the democratic armies' moral ascendancy translated into ascendancy on the battlefield; and that great military leaders with a vision, leading these armies, can ignore traditional military tenets and crush enemy forces: Epaminondas' army of farmers attacked the heretofore invincible Spartan professional army and homeland; Sherman cut his supply lines and marched through the heart of enemy territory; and Patton succeeded when all other Allied generals were too timid and could have ended the war in 1944 if he was not held back.

Despite Hanson's eloquent writing, he is numbingly repetitious: at times it feels as if he's repeatedly beating you over the head with the same point or quotation. Readers familiar with his writing will again see his sweeping generalizations repeated while he ignores or belittles opposing viewpoints without giving them due consideration. (And anyone with any sympathy for the Southern viewpoint in the Civil War will not like Hanson's vitriolic condemnation of almost every aspect of the antebellum South.)

As sympathetic as I am to Hanson's argument that a democratic army fighting tyranny is superior to all others, I found this book intriguing and persuasive, but ultimately unconvincing. Hanson could have made the same ambitious arguments without the lumbering repetition or overstated conclusions, expanded his narrative history to tell the whole story instead of part of the story, and still written a much shorter book. Ultimately, despite these shortcomings, this is a stimulating book that anyone with a serious interest in military history should read.

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 leads 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, they 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 Soul of Battle

Such is the case that the outstanding military historian Victor Davis Hanson makes in The Soul of Battle. Drawing mainly on three
historical examples--Epaminondas leading Thebes against Sparta; Sherman marching through the South; and Patton driving the Third Army
to Berlin--Mr. Hanson illustrates the similarities among these different leaders, the men they led, and the ideals for which they fought. He
makes a compelling case that there is no more dangerous military force in human history than a democratic populace, raised to righteous
moral anger, and commanded by leaders who understand the unique strength of such an army. He demonstrates that though even we tend to
accept the myth, fond in the hearts of totalitarian leaders and the rest of those who hate us, that democracies are necessarily inefficient when
it comes to warfare and that the freedoms of such societies are hindrance to the prosecution of said warfare, in fact :

Democracy, and its 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 back into the culture that produced them. It is 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.

And what is "the soul of battle" to which he attributes such world-changing power? :

A rare thing indeed that arises only when free men march unabashedly toward the heartland of their enemy in hopes of saving the
doomed, when their vast armies are aimed at salvation and liberation not conquest and enslavement. Only then does battle take on a
spiritual dimension, one that defines a culture, teaches it what civic militarism is and how it is properly used.

Mr. Hanson thus provides the reader with an invaluable framework for understanding history, modern and ancient, and for understanding the
often underestimated strengths of democratic society.

Lest prospective readers dismiss the book as mere triumphalism, as some are wont to ignore Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, it
should, first of all, be noted that Mr. Hanson's portrayals of the three generals are absolutely riveting. Most of us are familiar with Patton, at
least through the movie, and somewhat with Sherman, but the name Epaminondas summons forth little more than an old mildly racist folk
story. Mr. Hanson restores him to his rightful place in the pantheon of democratic heroes, the destroyer of Spartan helotage, just as Sherman
helped destroy slavery and Patton helped destroy Nazism. These men's stories would be worth reading if only because of the role each
played in the utter destruction of the abominable regimes of their time, but the idiosyncrasies and flamboyant aspects of their character, their
deep commitment to learning and to the craft of warfare, and their unusual understanding of the opportunity that their societies had afforded
them by granting them command of these armies, makes them truly fascinating to read about. Particularly enjoyable is the way in which he
redeems each man against his more revered colleagues--Epaminondas vs. Pericles; Sherman vs. Lee; Patton vs. Bradley and
Eisenhower--showing that in their single-minded focus on the battle itself, each deserves greater credit than their more political, and more
self-interested rivals, and that, though each is considered bloodthirsty, in reality the very thoroughness with which they sought victory
ultimately saved lives. Perhaps most importantly, Mr. Hanson helps us to see why democracies need such men, however politically
incorrect, even somewhat demented, their behavior may be at times. A McLellan, a Marshall, an Eisenhower, a Colin Powell, is all well and
good for the bureaucratic function of running an army, but when it comes to inspiring men to fight, kill, and die, we must have Shermans
and Pattons and Schwartzkopfs to turn to in the field.

Nor is Mr. Hanson just saying that "we win, because we're us". He is equally good on the reasons that democracies (particularly America)
have failed in wars that do not follow the guidelines he lays out. In Korea, where McArthur could not go after the Chinese; in Vietnam,
where we fought an entirely defensive war; in the Persian Gulf, where Schwarzkopf was not allowed to march to Baghdad, we not only
failed to win the wars, but needlessly prolonged the suffering of Koreans, Vietnamese, Iraqis and Americans. In the end, the immediate
dealing of death would have been more humane than ever the seemingly moderate limitations proved to be. And Mr. Hanson forces us to
ponder how much better a place the world might have been and how much misery might have been averted had Patton and Curtis LeMay
(under whose command Mr. Hanson's own father served) been given the free hand they desired to carry a liberationist war to Moscow.
Instead, as Patton protested :

[T]in-soldier politicians in Washington have allowed us to kick hell out of one bastard and at the same time forced us to help establish a
second one as evil or more evil than the first.

Out of these bitter experiences flow lessons that have special relevance to our own times. For one, we would do well not to let people like
the radical Islamicists continue in the delusion that because we are a democracy we are an overripe fruit ready to fall and rot. It is the nature
of our system that in times of peace we disarm to an almost absurd degree, but our unwillingness to spend money to keep up the armed
forces and our hesitancy to get involved abroad should not be confused with terminal helplessness. As bin Laden has found out, to his likely
dismay, once provoked, we remain willing, even eager, to unleash a totally disproportionate level of lethality upon those who rile us. On the
other hand, we would do well to remind ourselves that once moved to action there should be no surcease to the battle until we have entirely
rooted out the evil we face. The most important lesson that Epaminondas, Sherman, and Patton have to teach us is that democratic brutality
turned against totalitarian evil, and carried to its ultimate conclusion, is capable of utterly destroying those malevolent systems. The
measures we take may briefly trouble our consciences but they succeed brilliantly. Having picked up the sword, we owe it to ourselves, and
even to the populace in the nations we oppose, not to set it down again until the job is done.

Mr. Hanson's book would make rewarding reading at any time, but it is especially applicable right now. And be sure to look for his
outstanding column in National Review. His writing on the current conflict has been consistently prescient; not surprising, since this book
itself predicts much of what has occurred so far. It remains though to be seen whether President Bush and his advisers understand its full
import.

GRADE : A+